Austerity Politics Research Articles

Against austerity and repression: Historical and contemporary manifestations of progressive politicisation in Turkey

This paper aims to explore the growing and deepening trend of politics of repression coupled with prolonged crisis and austerity politics, reflecting on the potentials as well as limitations of progressive politics in such a constrained context. Austerity policies continue pushing for anti-labour and reactionary politics in a variety of forms reflecting the unresolved crisis conditions of contemporary capitalism. While the liberal democratic state-form remains relatively intact in particular contexts, in others, it gradually evolves into repressive forms. The growing repression risks conceiving the anti-authoritarian struggles and the anti-capitalist and labour movements separate and/or mutually exclusive. This review article draws on the recent insights of (de)politicization, labour geography and history and political economy scholarships with specific reference to the case of Turkey while cautioning against the binary thinking of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in leftist and labour mobilisations. It proposes a historical perspective in order to appreciate the diversity and multiplicity of struggles against the intersecting nodes of austerity, capitalism and repression in the complex geographies of periphery.

When open source design is vital: critical making of DIY healthcare equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical devices needed during the COVID-19 pandemic were widely reported in early 2020. In response, civic DIY volunteers explored how they could produce the required equipment. Members of communities such as hacker- and makerspaces employed their skills and tools to manufacture, for example, face shields and masks. The article discusses these civic innovation practices and their broader social implications by relating them to critical making theory. Methodologically, it is based on a digital ethnography approach, focusing on hacker and maker communities in the UK. Communities’ DIY initiatives display characteristics of critical making and ‘craftivism’, as they assessed and counteracted politicised healthcare supply shortages. It is argued that their manufacturing activities during the COVID pandemic relate to UK austerity politics’ effects on healthcare and government failure to ensure medical crisis supplies. Facilitated by open source design, communities’ innovation enabled healthcare emergency equipment. At the same time, their DIY manufacturing raises practical as well as ethical issues concerning, among other things, efficacy and safety of use.

Rethinking populism and democracy in politically turbulent times

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of populist politics across the globe. The early 21st century saw the pink tide of left wing populism in Latin America, the Southern European populisms that rejected the politics of austerity after 2013, and the right wing populisms that now dominate not only European but global polities. Although each instance of populist politics is distinct, all share an appeal to the people, to the true people, who both oppose and are dominated by the political elite. The nature of this elite also varies – in some cases it is predatory capital; in other cases it is the multicultural left; in yet others the anonymous bureaucrats in Brussels undermining national sovereignty. This special issue of RECERCA poses one question: how does populism relate to democracy? Is it democracy’s other face?

Co-Opting the Streets of Liverpool: Self-Organization and the Role of Local Authorities

ABSTRACT Within the context of austerity politics, there is an increasing emphasis on regeneration initiatives that originate in civil society itself. While community-led contributions are supported by local authorities for their self-organisation and empowerment of communities, ownership of the planning process allows the local authority to retain power over the community, and subsequently co-opt initiatives in the interest of their own wider regeneration plans. However, given communities often lack resources, the involvement of the local authority is often necessary to ensure future development. This paper argues that this dynamic places community-led schemes at risk of co-optation, meaning plans are community-outsourced rather than facilitating the potential of self-organisation by communities.

Responsibilisation of caregivers in depression: the limitations of policy-based evidence

The principle of family and carer involvement is scattered throughout much recent mental health policy. Inspired by Bacchi’s ‘what’s the problem represented to be’ approach to policy analysis, we consider guidelines relating to depression in the UK and Denmark, two examples of European health systems which have undergone reforms based on neoliberal principles effectuating austerity politics. The analysis shows how carer involvement recommendations in depression guidelines reflect a responsibilisation agenda rather than a sound evidence and that the policies represent the problem to be a potentially risky patient along with consequential bureaucratic risks of involving the caregiver. In order to put the political agenda into perspective, we outline qualitative research on family life with depression which we argue could have informed ‘evidence-based’ guidelines. This research emphasises the complexity of family life with depression in which the origins of depression, maintaining factors, family context, pathways to treatment, treatment models and other routes to recovery all interact in a way that means the requirement for ‘carer involvement’ as simplified in current guidelines is naive at best. We consider the gap between evidence and policy and note that carer involvement recommendations reflect a failure to understand depression within a context of complex dynamic family relationships.

Algorithmic Profiling of Job Seekers in Austria: How Austerity Politics Are Made Effective.

As of 2020, the Public Employment Service Austria (AMS) makes use of algorithmic profiling of job seekers to increase the efficiency of its counseling process and the effectiveness of active labor market programs. Based on a statistical model of job seekers' prospects on the labor market, the system—that has become known as the AMS algorithm—is designed to classify clients of the AMS into three categories: those with high chances to find a job within half a year, those with mediocre prospects on the job market, and those clients with a bad outlook of employment in the next 2 years. Depending on the category a particular job seeker is classified under, they will be offered differing support in (re)entering the labor market. Based in science and technology studies, critical data studies and research on fairness, accountability and transparency of algorithmic systems, this paper examines the inherent politics of the AMS algorithm. An in-depth analysis of relevant technical documentation and policy documents investigates crucial conceptual, technical, and social implications of the system. The analysis shows how the design of the algorithm is influenced by technical affordances, but also by social values, norms, and goals. A discussion of the tensions, challenges and possible biases that the system entails calls into question the objectivity and neutrality of data claims and of high hopes pinned on evidence-based decision-making. In this way, the paper sheds light on the coproduction of (semi)automated managerial practices in employment agencies and the framing of unemployment under austerity politics.

Capitalized money, austerity and the math of capitalism

This article seeks to contribute to the existing critical debates on money and debt by advancing three main arguments. First, largely due to such debates’ tendency for description, the article argues that in in the heterodox literature on money and debt there is no convincing critical theory of money creation. For this reason the authors introduce the theory of capital as power and how it can help us theorize the consequences of present money creation. Second, the authors demonstrate how the capitalization of money creation by a minority of investors not only leads to the political chase for unsustainable economic growth, but also how there is a differential distribution of interest upwards that helps generate greater economic inequality in the United States. Third, they argue that in an era of declining growth, dominant owners of capital seek to recapture their expected return on investments by extracting a greater share of the national income from the vast majority of citizens through a fiscal politics of austerity.

Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction to the Special Issue Yvonne Ivory (bio) and Ed Madden (bio) In In a Queer Time and Place (2005), Judith (Jack) Halberstam argued that “part of what has made queerness compelling as a form of self-description [ . . . ] has to do with the way it has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space” (1–2). Queer uses of time and space can operate “in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Halberstam suggests that we consider queerness beyond the merely sexual to understand queer identity as a mark of “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices” (1). Elsewhere, David Lloyd has argued, in Irish Times (2014), that Irish culture is marked by “layered time”: haunted by unfinished pasts that may resist capitalist logic and historical time. In the call for papers, we asked: how might these insights be thought together? Queering Ireland 2017, the conference upon which this special issue is based, was a joint event— the nineteenth annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference, and the fifth in a series of Queering Ireland conferences. In 2009, the first Queering Ireland conference was held at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, bringing together a small international contingent of Irish studies and sexuality studies scholars. Queering Ireland 2011 was held in Cork, Ireland, and focused on activism and activist communities, a felt absence at the 2009 conference. Queering Ireland 2013 moved to Buffalo, New York, with a focus on diaspora. The 2015 conference, focused on queer politics, was held in Dublin in August of that year, the perfect time and place for thinking about the relation of queer politics to neoliberalism and [End Page vii] normative identity politics, given the passage of the marriage equality referendum in May, the first successful national vote on marriage equality in the world. Over four international conferences in three countries, Queering Ireland has remained small, which has encouraged a rich and developing conversation. The conference has always included activists and performers alongside academics. Also consistent has been an ethos of collaboration and support and a special attention to the needs of graduate student scholars and activist-scholars outside the academy. The 2017 conference was the first to include a session on dance, and the collaboration with the University of South Carolina’s Comparative Literature conference facilitated a broader conversation on sexuality and citizenship. The conference took as its theme Queer Times, asking that participants think about strange temporalities, queer life schedules and narratives, eccentric economic practices, as well as issues of age and movement sustainability. How can queer times help us to understand Irish times, we asked? What can queer times say about the representation and politics of marriage, about the intersections and disjunctions of queer and feminist politics? How do we think about queer time across borders, nations, communities? How can queer time reframe economic crisis, austerity politics, the biopolitical, and narratives of nation, economy, culture, and family. How can the theoretical work on queer time by Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman, Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, José Esteban Muñoz, Kathryn Bond Stockton, and others, enrich our understanding of Irish history, literature, and culture. We asked that participants consider such topics as: queer and trans temporalities (queer life narratives, legibility, and limitations), queer futurity and a queer political imagination, queer methodologies and temporality, the relation of the body to time, temporality and narrative (histories and counter-histories, secret histories, cause and effect, duration, chronology), memory studies (trauma, commemoration and public memory, queer nostalgia), generational differences and continuities, HIV/AIDS, and archives and archival work. (University of South Carolina archives staff put together a small exhibit of queer and Irish materials from the University of South Carolina Hollings Library, Special Collections.) We also asked that participants think about the relation of queer time to citizenship, as migration studies and sexuality [End Page viii] studies have developed a rigorous and multi-faceted account of the relation of sexuality to citizenship, from the sociological overviews of gay and lesbian cultures by Jon Binnie to more recent studies of migration, sexuality, and citizenship by Eithne Luibhéid, Jasbir Puar, and others...

Can Global Imbalances Continue? The State of the United States Economy

Objective: This study investigates the issue of global imbalances by exploring, in a historical context, the interconnections between the United States current account imbalances and the processes underlying allocative inefficiency, financialisation and austerity politics. Research Design & Methods: A comprehensive review of published studies is the research methodology used in this article. Published secondary data from both governments and international institutions are presented and discussed. Findings: The study find that the deep nature of the current imbalances and economic crisis in the United States could adversely affect the rest of the world. Although the IMF and other institutions of global governance have now questioned the effectiveness of neoliberal policies, the severe measures the IMF advocates in response to current account deficits could presage yet another era of anti-growth austerity measures in the United States. Implications/Recommendations: There are features of the current account US imbalances situation that have the potential to exacerbate negative trends and to further fuel adverse economic and political outcomes. The study suggests that a coordinated, US-led international response to a future global recession could be even more deficient than the current response to climate change. Contribution: The paper makes a contribution to the literature on the failures of global governance and critically examines the economic risks of the current situation that are being compounded by the political approach of the Trump Administration, which characterises US trade partners as adversaries in need of coercion through tariffs and strident rhetoric.

Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis ed. by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos, and: Living under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis ed. by Evdoxios Doxiadis and Aimee Placas, and: Greece in Crisis: Combining Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistic Perspectives ed. by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos, and: Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity ed. by

Reviewed by: Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis ed. by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos, and: Living under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis ed. by Evdoxios Doxiadis and Aimee Placas, and: Greece in Crisis: Combining Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistic Perspectives ed. by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos, and: Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity ed. by Dimitris Tziovas Soo-Young Kim (bio) Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Agelopoulos, editors, Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis. London and New York: Routledge. 2018. Pp. x + 270. Hardcover $155.00. Evdoxios Doxiadis and Aimee Placas, editors, Living under Austerity: Greek Society in Crisis. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2018. Pp. xii + 362. 11 tables, 9 figures. Hardcover $135.00. Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos, editors, Greece in Crisis: Combining Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistic Perspectives. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 2017. Pp. viii + 471. Hardcover $158.00. Dimitris Tziovas, editor, Greece in Crisis: The Cultural Politics of Austerity. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. 2017. Pp xii + 323. 11 figures, 5 charts, 2 tables. Hardcover $120.00. What was the Greek crisis? Readers may reasonably expect a recent spate of edited collections about this crisis to provide insight into this question. Between these readers and any straightforward answer, however, lies a more elementary question to contend with—what does it even mean to produce scholarship about crisis? All but the least reflective writing about crisis grapples with a tension between the concept's capacity for lucidity on the one hand and exclusion on the other—between what is gained by evoking and delimiting a crisis versus what gets lost or rendered unthinkable through these very same efforts. As a result, scholarship is necessarily about the crisis in two distinct senses—it teaches us about crisis as an object of analysis and it reveals to us how crisis operates as a frame through which to analyze. The editors of these four collections are certainly cognizant of this dual role of crisis as both an analytic object and an analytic frame. Each collection focuses on a distinct aspect of the Greek experience of crisis: Dalakoglou and Agelopoulos' volume on social change and everyday life, Doxiadis and Placas' on austerity, Hatzidaki and Goutsos' on discourse, and Tziovas' on culture. The resulting collections are revelatory of how crisis becomes a shared frame—not [End Page 563] only for authors and editors, but also for their subjects and their readers—that shapes the scholarship produced and received through it. So what do we learn about crisis by approaching it through the lens of each collection's particular focus? And what do we learn about each field of focus by studying it though the frame of crisis? Before reading too much into the crisis framing, it is worth acknowledging the academic and publishing conditions that insist that scholarship about Greece is most legible when presented through the figure of crisis. This is especially the case when it comes to presumed audiences outside of Greece, for which all four of these volumes in English are presumably intended by their publishers. From this perspective, the flowering of scholarship seemingly about the Greek crisis may disclose more about academic imagination than about empirical realities in Greece or inherent qualities of crisis as a concept or phenomenon. Nonetheless, there are surely consequences, many of which have yet to be revealed, to the fact that scholarship of the past decade in Greece is largely compelled to present itself in the figure of scholarship about crisis. Greece in Crisis: Combining Critical Discourse and Corpus Linguistic Perspectives, edited by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos, asks how the Greek crisis is "discursively materialized," that is, how "actors connected with the crisis in Greece talk and write about it" (4). What this focus on discourse facilitates, the editors hope, is "an insider's view" of the crisis that enables the volume "to get the, mainly, Greek voices heard" (4). The collection is also motivated by a particular methodological objective whose potential disciplinary contribution extends beyond the volume's topical focus—namely, integrating corpus linguistics and discourse analysis methods in order to draw on both the former...

Review of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance by Robert McRuer (NYU Press)

In his new book <i>Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance</i>, Robert McRuer offers his notion of "crip time" as an analytic through which we may critique the spatio-temporalities of austerity, late capitalism, and the cultural logic of neoliberalism. McRuer’s position is that disability is at the core of a global politics of austerity and of neoliberalism. What does it mean that disability is central to a global politics of austerity? For McRuer, it means that thinking about austerity through "crip time" can highlight an ongoing politics of representation of disability. That is, neoliberalism actively produces certain ways of being disabled that are conducive to its continued operation. But, "crip time" points to the ways in which this politics of representation does not fully capture disability. Disability exceeds austerity and neoliberalism. <i>Crip Times</i>, then, offers a critical examination of how disability is represented within the cultural logic of neoliberalism. At the same time, McRuer cautions against, as some past projects in disability and queer theory have done, fully rejecting or embracing the politics of identity, representation, and rights.

Decentralisation and central-local relations: the case of policing and mental health in England

Over the last decade, British governments have advocated a combined policing and health policy based on the premise that everyday more people come to police attention due to mental illness issues. Central authorities emphasise co-produced local community initiatives including street triage and clinical liaison and diversion programmes as mechanisms for better managing mental health issues. The model of governance of policing and mental health developed by the Conservative governments emphasises a decentralisation of services as a means of better managing local demands. Consequently, much of the policy burden falls upon local police forces and the austerity-afflicted NHS overstressing the front lines of delivery. We argue that this rationale challenges the traditionally established model of central-local governance which saw local authorities implementing national policy. However, whilst central government has shifted responsibility for services to local deliverers, the structural and policy barriers to an integrated approach to mental health and policing have proven difficult to change when directed from the centre of government. The executive’s continuous direction of policy in a climate of austerity politics triggers not only a debate on the sustainability of local governance but also with regard to what power of delivery local institutions have. We conclude that the nature of governmental decentralisation on cross-sectorial policymaking can jeopardise the creation of sustainable local governance practices.

A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia ed. by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan

Reviewed by: A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia ed. by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan Kevin B. Johnson A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Edited by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 263. Paper, $29.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4272-8; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4271-1.) Before federal immigration policy jeopardized child welfare with mass detentions and family separations, the school crisis in Farmville, Virginia, during the 1950s was an origin for present-day austerity politics. Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan have compiled a timely document collection that captures the inception of modern conservatism in rural America, set during the civil rights struggle’s modern phase and white supremacist resistance. African American student activists like Barbara Johns spearheaded fights for quality education in a rigidly segregated rural community. Inspired by teacher Inez Davenport, Johns initiated a 1951 student-led boycott of Robert R. Moton High School; hundreds of black pupils fled “‘tar paper shacks’” and demanded a modern school (p. 34). Included here are a litany of documents emphasizing the local, state, and national developments of central Virginia’s long, complex march toward unitary schooling. The editors have divided the collection into seven chapters along with a prologue—containing the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) opinions and the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act—and an epilogue providing writings on racial reconciliation from the 1990s. The intervening chapters include major sources covering women and the black freedom struggle, resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and the inception of dog whistle politics. In 1959 Prince Edward County, Virginia, opted for an “‘extreme step’” by closing all of its public schools, thereby depriving some 2,700 African American children of any form of education for five years (p. 112). Sources for integration in Virginia allow readers to examine the absurdity of segregation; in particular, Edwin B. Henderson’s article from 1957 explains how segregationist policies served white Virginians’ economic interests. “Once segregation is outmoded,” he writes, “educated and intelligent Negroes will become competitors in a free society” for professional employment (p. 104). He likewise notes segregationists’ fears of miscegenation while they ignored the racial intermixing prevalent in the state’s population. [End Page 527] The sources in chapter 4 highlight the national response to such extreme forms of racial conservatism, and the editors introduce the documents with contextual information regarding segregationists’ tactics—vacillating between massive resistance and delay. Once the county board ceased funding public schools, the decision created chaos and upheaval for black and white children. “The entire social fabric of the county was disrupted,” Daugherity and Grogan note (p. 114). White students attended white private academies in basements and movie theaters, while many black children “left the county to live with relatives” (p. 114). The editors’ sources and contextual introductions illuminate an aspect of the civil rights era in which “‘patriotic constitutionalists’” concealed white supremacy in coded policies that ripped children from their rural Virginia community (p. 62). Daugherity and Grogan exemplify this major theme by juxtaposing sources by civil rights attorneys Spottswood W. Robinson III and Oliver W. Hill and segregationists James J. Kilpatrick and Harry F. Byrd Sr., among others. The chronological documentary format makes the work a nice complement to Jill Ogline Titus’s monograph, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2011). Kevin B. Johnson Arkansas State University, Beebe Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

‘Defend the Ten’: Everyday dissensus against the slow spoiling of Lambeth’s libraries

In April 2016, 200 people in the London Borough of Lambeth occupied Carnegie Library, forcibly preventing its closure by a local council rolling-out deep austerity measures. The nine-day occupation was a high-point of 15 months of struggle to ‘Defend the Ten’ libraries in Lambeth against an austerity agenda the council sought to smoothly administer. Through an in-depth account of the struggle, this paper tells a story of the occupation foregrounding the protracted process and persistent interventions that led up to it. In doing so, it makes two contributions to critical geographical literatures on post-crisis austerity, responding to calls for rich, processual, and multi-scalar accounts of how austerity measures are downloaded and rolled-out, as well as experienced and resisted in everyday and undecided ways. First, going beyond an account of austerity as a fiscal policy imposed on cities from above, the paper makes visible the everyday spatial violence of austerity that is rolled-out, experienced, and resisted as a slow spoiling of social infrastructure. Second, it makes sense of the ambivalent (post)politics of austerity, developing an account of everyday dissensus to reveal mundane non-evental ruptures and the emergence of demands for real democracy in a context of closure shaped by forces of dispossession.

Nationalism and the politics of austerity: comparing Catalonia, Scotland, and Québec

ABSTRACT This article examines the impact of austerity on the politics of nationalism in Catalonia, Scotland, and Québec. In Catalonia, the recession and subsequent politics of austerity aided a secessionist turn triggered by an important judgement of the Spanish Constitutional Court. In Scotland, the Conservative austerity policies gave powerful arguments to the Scottish National Party in the context of the 2014 referendum on independence. In contrast, in Québec, austerity had no visible impact on nationalism. Our analysis of the impact of austerity on nationalism stresses the role of blame assignation as it intersects with political institutions and fiscal pressures.

From Out of Apathy to the post-political: The spatial politics of austerity, the geographies of politicisation and the trajectories of the Scottish left(s)

This paper offers an alternative approach to some of the temporalising logics and imaginaries which have dominated debates around the post-political and post-democracy. It does this through engaging with the writings of figures associated with the ‘First New Left’ notably Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson between 1956 and 1962. I argue that their essays in texts such as Out of Apathy bear some striking similarities with the claims of literatures relating to post-politics and post-democracy. Their work I argue repays substantive engagement; however, because through its attentiveness to emergent practices and geographies of antagonism, it offers a more generative and politically strategic resolution to some of the common discontents of consensus and marketisation of politics that has characterised work on post-politics. The paper develops these arguments through a discussion of how the uneven geographies of politicisation and trajectories of the Scottish left(s) in different parts of the post-war period have shaped and impacted on the spatial politics of austerity in significant ways.

Spatial planning and territorial governance in Southern Europe between economic crisis and austerity policies

ABSTRACTThis article examines how spatial planning systems have changed in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece in times of economic recession and austerity politics, in amid pressures of external actors, and local conditions and traditions. We analyse the round of reforms of spatial planning and territorial governance implemented by national governments under pressures by European institutions, as well as local responses to them. On the one hand, we highlight how European institutions have used the conditionalities attached to bailout packages and other instrument of pressure to frame what can be considered an implicit Southern European spatial planning policy developed by the European Union. On the other, we suggest that Southern European planning amid crisis and austerity should be understood, together, as field that problematizes the idea of Europeanization of planning; a space used as ‘prototype’ for new rounds of neoliberalization; and a political space that continuously develops through top-down/bottom-up dialectic conflicts.

Crisis, austerity and the normalisation of precarity in Spain – in academia and beyond

Austerity politics and labour reforms in Spain have intensified the precaritization of employment, both inside and outside academia. Drawing on the cases of two highly educated young women, this paper suggests an analysis of academic precarity that focuses on the intertwining of the academic and the non‐academic world of work in (re)producing precarity. In Spain, a less precarious alternative to precarity in academia is often non‐existent, putting young academics in a situation of blackmail to accept precarious conditions. Consequently, precarity is increasingly normalised. Yet, the process of the normalisation of precarity is understood not only as the growth of precarious jobs and the lack of alternatives, but, more fundamentally, as a shift in the perception of what can be legitimately claimed or expected within employment relations more generally.

The politics of bad policy: Why don’t governments pick win-wins?

Abstract Background Why, fundamentally, are the politics and public opinion of ageing and health so badly mis-aligned with facts about the costs of ageing societies? The literature has for decades characteristically divided between an old politics of expansion and the post-1990s new politics of recalibration and austerity. The problem for understanding the politcs of health and ageint is that a mix is also plausible: recalibration with an element of expansion in long term care. This mix then leads to a further thought: When do governments expand mature welfare states to deal with risks not covered in traditional male-wage-earner welfare programs? Methods A narrative review was conducted on the thin literature available attempting to answer the question as to why governments are not picking win-wins (e.g. keep people healthy so they can actually retire at their formal retirement ages, or ensure informal care is valued). Results There were a handful of hypotheses identified in the review, including: the “old politics” of welfare expansion where “credit claiming” is used for highly popular initiatives, the “new politics of the welfare state” also known as the “blame avoidance thesis” where politicians will attempt to avoid blame by making cuts less transparent, “blame buffering” and the “median voter theory” as well as “negative policy feedback”. Conclusions Mature welfare states are not expanding. In fact, the theories on the politics of ageing are focused on how welfare states are retrenching or reforming, as they call it. Blame avoidance and blame buffering are the most common explanations for decisions, often counterproductive ones, about how to recalibrate welfare states in the face of ageing.

Multiple environmentalities and post-politicization in a Canadian Mountain Park

This research explores the centrality of multiple environmentalities at multiple scales in the post-politicization of conservation governance in Jasper National Park, Canada. Austerity politics in Canada contributed to the post-politicization of conservation as the interests of Parks Canada and private developers were brought into alignment in terms of increasing visitation and the revenue imperative. The Parks Canada Agency, under structural pressure, employed several post-political strategies to suture the space for dissensus and debate and orchestrate the appearance of consent for the private development and management of park services. Central to these strategies were multiple (sovereign, disciplinary, and neoliberal) environmentalities constructed at multiple scales by multiple actors (the federal government, the local parks department, and private sector interests) aimed at producing environmental subjects who understand and acquiesce to the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to a privatized conservation practice. In response, opponents attempted to mobilize an alternative environmentality, combining a social democratic critique of neoliberalism with a Romantic vision of wilderness conservation. Although opponents enrolled a sizeable number of allies, they fell short of stabilizing a liberation environmentality as several underlying points of ‘agreement’ contributed to the stabilization of post-political discourse and practice, foreclosing alternative political economies of conservation.