Political Jurisdictions Research Articles

The Rise and Transfer of the River Chief System: A Review of Chinese Water Governance and Its Potential to Transfer to the Global Community

As a result of water sustainability issues, China has enacted a range of policies to improve its water ecosystem since the middle of the 20th century. These measures include the creation of the Seven River Conservancy Commissions, the development (combination and recombination) of ministries and departments to address environmental pollution and degradation, and recently, the implementation of the river chief system. Considering the importance of global water sustainability and the positive impact Chinese measures have had in this area, the author will examine if the river chief can be transferred to other political jurisdictions. To do this, the author gathered data using keyword searches of the Web of Science and Google Scholar, official government sites, media sites and key international organizations. Based on this, the author reviews the development of the river chief system in the context of broader ecological reforms, places the rise of the river chief in the context of potential lessons for future improvement, and speculates on the possibility that China could transfer the river chief to countries facing similar challenges in their water governance regimes.

State formation, diplomacy and sport: the British Empire Games, Ireland and Northern Ireland, 1930–38

AbstractThis paper considers the interconnected practices of state formation, diplomacy, national identity and sport through an examination of ‘Irish’ involvement in the British Empire Games of 1930, 1934 and 1938. These events had a contradictory role in bolstering diplomatic relations between those who were committed to the empire but also in expressing the aspirations of those who sought independence from it, or a distinct identity within it. State formation and diplomacy played out in sporting contexts — which we term sportcraft — and this process was especially complex in post-partition Ireland. In the period under examination, a gradual but significant hardening of ideologies and identities occurred in certain sports on the island, notably athletics, mirroring the effects of partition and reflecting British and unionist political actions and sportive interests. Original archival and documentary material is presented from state archives in Dublin, London, Belfast and Ottawa, and from official sports collections in Birmingham, London, Stirling, Melbourne (Australia), Hamilton (Canada) and Lausanne (Switzerland). This demonstrates that by the early 1920s, government officials and sports administrators had already recognised the propaganda functions and utility of sport for state formation purposes and for issues of political control, jurisdiction and territorial boundaries.

Regionalizing the Sustainable Development Goals for Island Societies: Lessons From Iceland and Newfoundland

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a framework that makes the concept of “sustainable development” more actionable. The nature of island societies — where political jurisdictions overlap in complex ways with land and oceanic ecologies — makes the question of who is responsible for SDG implementation and governance particularly important. We compare SDG interpretations and perceptions of SDG governance in Iceland and Newfoundland using survey and focus group data with stakeholders from government, business, labour, civil society, academia, and youth. Our research questions are as follows: How do research participants view the SDGs in relation to ensuring sustainable futures for their respective island societies? How do research participants view the roles of government and other institutions in implementing sustainability? Answering these questions gives insight into a third theoretically valuable question: Is it the state versus subnational jurisdiction distinction, or is it the common small polity/island dynamics of these cases that is important for understanding the interpretations of the SDGs and their implementation? The interpretations of regionalizing and localizing the SDGs are similar across our two cases, which lends support to a small polity/islandness view of how the SDGs are translated for island societies.

Temporary migration and middle class nation building in Canada

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between temporary labor migration programs (TLMPs) in the post-war era and middle-class nation-building. The analysis centers on Canada, an exemplary case of balancing the rights of foreign workers and national concerns. By examining two eras of Canadian TLMPs – one Keynesian and the other neoliberal – I foreground how and why temporariness has reemerged as a norm in (im)migration policy. Relative to TLMPs before 1990, contemporary ones emphasize merit, skill, and private actors with implications for how countries like Canada imagine political belonging. In the neoliberal era, the normative emphasis on permanence is challenged by a more transactional view of people’s standing in a political jurisdiction. If this is a global shift, this analysis raises questions about whether we are now experiencing a doubling down on the market logics of migration and national membership, a backlash against it, or something different.

Credible and comprehensive? Comparing policy mixes for Local Energy Systems in England, Scotland and Wales

Integrated Local Energy Systems (LES) are being pursued internationally as a component of net zero, with additional benefits to regions and communities. This paper develops and tests a policy mixes approach to examine differential development of LES policies over 11 years in the three political jurisdictions (England, Scotland and Wales) which comprise Great Britain's (GB) single energy market. The analysis contributes to knowledge about the strengths and weaknesses of the policy mixes concept as an analytical tool for exploring divergence in devolved governments. It also considers the likely effectiveness of these policy mixes for stimulating LES developments in practice. Analysis of over 50 policy strategies and 105 policy instruments is used to evaluate the credibility of the policy mixes, ie. whether these are believable and reliable, and their comprehensiveness, ie. whether all market, system and institutional failures are addressed. The policy mix in England exhibits fluctuation and short-termism, making it the least credible. Strategies in Scotland and Wales demonstrate a more credible and ambitious policy mix for LES, including long term policies and new instruments added over time. However, limited political powers mean that the policy mixes in Scotland and Wales are less comprehensive than in England, making the realisation of LES uncertain. Further, none of the policies are designed to challenge systemic interdependencies of GB's liberalised and largely centralised energy system. This ultimately limits capacity to deliver LES and highlights the need for policy development, in GB and elsewhere, to encompass regulatory and institutional innovation to realise LES benefits.

“Princeton’s Gift to Turkey”: Exploring the Political Matrix of the Orpheus Mosaic from Jerusalem and Late Ottoman Sardis

ABSTRACT Whereas it has often been argued that conflict and Western imperial ambitions and ensuing Ottoman defensive policies guided the direction of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century archaeology in Anatolia and the Middle East, here we offer a perspective of high-profile American-Ottoman mutual partage diplomacy. This view stems from the relationship between Princeton University and the Imperial Museum in Constantinople. From a multiscalar approach that includes microlocal and macroimperial histories, we demonstrate how this American alliance trumped Ottoman citizenship and transcended physical and political jurisdictions. “Princeton’s Gift to Turkey”—the excavation, transfer, and installment of the Orpheus mosaic from the northwest corner of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem to the Imperial Museum—triggered a lasting relationship between Osman Hamdi Bey and Howard Crosby Butler. Underwritten by financial means and technological capacity, this alliance foreshadowed the transformative period at Late Ottoman Sardis.

Emotions of Candidates on Twitter in the 2023 Seville City Council Election: A Second-Order Campaign?

This paper analyses the messages that candidates emitted on the social network Twitter (now called “X”) during the campaign for the 2023 municipal elections in the city of Seville and the emotions they used. This type of electoral process has usually been deemed as second-order elections within multilevel governance political systems, implying that the national arena may affect local dynamics to some degree. Thus, the main research objective is to determine the extent to which elements of nationalisation were used in candidates’ rhetoric, along with the emotional components associated with each political formation during a local campaign somewhat relevant on the state level. A total of 960 tweets were retrieved through R Statistics and the Application Programming Interface of the social network itself. They were then analysed drawing upon the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count programme. The results show that certain elements of nationalisation were indeed used by candidates, in addition to emotional-level differences present in their messages. This accentuates the evident need for further research on municipal elections and campaigns, as well as on their potential distinctive features regarding political jurisdiction.

Challenging Nation-Statism

Critical scholarship can be a way of enacting insurrections against entrenched and enduring dogmatisms of the nation-state and its inalienable right to systematically deploy violence against selective Others. This article focuses upon the violent bordering practices of the nation-statist system, their connexion to the bordering of knowledges, and their impact upon specific kinds of bodies at the border, which together enforce a systemic vulnerability that is tied to legacies of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism. In the first part, I reflect upon the violence of bordering practices in the nation-statist system, foregrounding how those who predominantly receive this violence in the form of death and debility are the racialized Others. I put forth four specific implications of these violent bordering practices: they enable a cascade of interlinked dehumanizations of people within the nation-state borders; they occlude from view how any nation-state is not homogeneous over time in terms of what one might see as national culture; they allow economic processes to be perceived as scientific and abstract rather than as embedded in the realms of contested political jurisdictions; and they render and sustain the nation-state itself as a racialized construct that both produces and profits from class inequality in contemporary capitalism. In the second part, I argue for the need to perceive the link between violent bordering practices and bordered knowledges, highlighting and synthesizing insights from across disciplines that can aid in asking counter-hegemonic questions. In conclusion, and as part of necessary anti-national scholarly enquiry, I call for a multidimensional and sustained critical stance towards the nation-states’ rights to enforce borders.

The limits of scalability: Uncovering friction between levels of flood risk governance in the French Alps

Flood risk governance can be a source of tension between different government actors and citizens across spatial scales. In this context, we consider the hydro-social contract (HSC) as a framework to understand the formal and informal societal constructs that aid or impede effectiveness in managing flood risk. Specifically, we used Q-methodology to understand different perspectives of flood risk governance and identify points of friction in executing the HSC. We interviewed 62 flood risk management actors from small municipalities (intra-watershed) to regional State agencies (inter-basin) in the Isère River basin of France, from which three perspectives emerged. Most participants correlated to a perspective reaffirming a commitment to integrated and holistic approaches in flood risk management. However, the second and third perspectives illustrate a governance gap due to an upward transfer of risk management responsibilities to a broader watershed approach. At the same time, municipalities remain responsible for crisis management in the advent of flooding. Our findings bring into question the right balance of scale in flood risk governance, particularly regarding hydrological boundaries that are incongruous with political jurisdictions at multiple scales.

The anchoring effect of climate change acts: a policy streams analysis of Ireland’s climate act reform

ABSTRACT The number of political jurisdictions introducing climate change acts (CCAs) has grown in recent years. As framework legislation, CCAs seek to exert anchoring effects on climate policy development by establishing general goals, principles and obligations that subsequent policies to reduce emissions must uphold. Despite expansive research on the negotiation of CCAs, limited analysis exists of factors shaping their anchoring effect or how tensions aligning other climate policies with CCA requirements are managed. This article addresses this by utilizing Kingdon’s multiple streams framework to analyze the negotiation of the Irish Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021, a CCA with contentious provisions for sectoral emissions ceilings. It examines how political agreement was secured on the need for stronger climate action (problem stream), the concept of the Act (policy stream), and individual provisions (political stream). The analysis nevertheless indicates that different interpretations of ‘the problem’ emerged in discussions on the impacts of sector emissions ceilings and carbon taxation. Consensus in the political stream equally proved challenging where representatives used the Act’s provisions to question other parties’ commitments to climate action, just transition and procedural fairness. The article highlights two broader considerations for the anchoring effect of CCAs: the importance of maintaining a consistent focus on climate change to prevent problems with policies to address climate change from dominating CCA debates; and whether to restrict CCAs to general principles that diminish their anchoring effect compared with incorporating detailed obligations that may increase political tensions over the CCA and future policies.

Effects of government policy, socioeconomics, and weather on residential GHG emissions across subnational jurisdictions: The case of Canada

Effective greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction policies require integration across both vertical and horizontal political jurisdictions. However, there remains much ambiguity about integrating these strategies across subnational jurisdictions because of knowledge gaps in quantifying the factors affecting emission variation across these jurisdictions. To address this, we modeled the effects of government policy, socioeconomics, and weather on GHG emissions from electricity, natural gas, and petrol for the average household in Canadian city and province jurisdictions, respectively, from 1997 to 2009. The percentage of GHG variation explained by our models ranged from 60.6% to 98.3% for cities and 71.1%–99.3% for provinces. The variation partitioning showed that socioeconomics was the most important variable category, accounting for 15.6%–49.0% of emission variation in cities and 66.6%–75.2% in provinces. Government policy was only significant at the city level, accounting for at most 4.8% of emission variation, but had joint contributions with other variable categories, particularly socioeconomics. Overall, the factors affecting residential GHG emissions changed from the city to provincial jurisdictions and the extent of these changes differed across energy sources. These findings stress the importance of integrating locally based, energy source specific policies into subnational and national based strategies for effective emission reductions.

Dismantling Londongrad: the dark geography of dirty money

ABSTRACT Londongrad is at once a place, a process and a paradox. As a place, it refers to the manifold ways in which London has acquired a reputation for being a safe harbour for dirty money largely on account of a secure system of property rights, a cluster of professional enablers and a neoliberal politics that actively cultivated it. As a process, it illustrates the premier role that London plays in the global system of secrecy jurisdictions. As a paradox it signals the bizarre alignment of two nominally opposed systems, authoritarian state capitalism in Russia and neoliberal capitalism in the UK. Before the war in Ukraine, it was tacitly assumed that Londongrad was impervious to reform because no single political jurisdiction had the reach or the remit to confront this baroque system. Dismantling Londongrad is therefore a belated attempt to regulate the dark geography of dirty money.

Fossil fuel racism in the United States: How phasing out coal, oil, and gas can protect communities

Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — lie at the heart of the interconnected crises we face, including climate change, racial injustice, and public health. Each stage of the fossil fuel life cycle — extraction, processing, transport, and combustion — generates toxic air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions that drive the global climate crisis. Addressing the harmful effects of energy decisions, including unequal risk distribution across various governance levels, supply chains, and political jurisdictions, is a complex task for policymakers and society. A deeper understanding of how harms are embodied within fossil fuel life cycles is needed. This paper provides a narrative review of recent studies within the United States (U.S.) that document both public health harms and disproportionate impacts along the fossil fuel life cycle. In the U.S. the public health hazards from air and water pollution, and risks associated with climate change, fall disproportionately on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. “Sacrifice zones” and systemic racism are deeply intertwined within the fossil-fuel based economy. We argue systemic racism subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by enabling it to externalize the costs of pollution and environmental degradation onto communities of color. We position “fossil fuel racism” as a subset of environmental racism and argue that this framing is useful because it shifts analytical and political focus to the systems and structures which are actively protecting and promoting continued production of fossil fuels. We discuss the implications of this body of research for climate policy, and outline how poorly designed “carbon-centric” policies—which focus narrowly on GHGs reduction—could fail to alleviate the racialized disparities or potentially worsen it for some communities. We emphasize the need to move beyond carbon-centric approaches to climate solutions to more integrative approaches to policy design that can improve public health, tackle the global climate crisis, and rectify our legacy of fossil fuel racism. Specifically we call for a managed phase out of fossil fuel production and the enactment of wider programs of social, economic, and democratic reforms via a Green New Deal. Adequately addressing the climate crisis and fossil fuel racism require political and policy solutions that disrupt the power and actions of the fossil fuel industry and their state allies.

Stateless Regionalism and Corporate Power: Willa Cather’s Public Relations Novel

AbstractThis article explores American novelists’ focus on towns or counties (such as Sweet Water, Eatonville, Winesburg, Yoknapatawpha) whether real or imagined, rather than states, and what that might teach us about the novel’s understanding of political totality and democratic action. Novels about towns or counties have been typically conceptualized with the discourse of regionalism, yet that has not led to a literary critical discussion of the federalist system of individual states joined in and as one nation, and how capitalist and corporate power impacts that totality. Focusing on Willa Cather’s novel A Lost Lady (1923), this article develops the notion of “stateless regionalism.” Cather’s novel portrays a political jurisdiction’s complete subsumption by the railroad corporation. Expanding on the town’s fate, the novel portrays the danger of the corporate form—with its attendant incentives, values, and limitations—as it dominates other social, democratic, and political institutions, including municipal town life and, eventually, characters’ sense of self.Cather thus offers us stateless regionalism: the realistic feeling of a political world that does not really function like a political totality at all.

Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating Its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequalities

To account for the extensive inequalities manifest within urban (or metropolitan) areas in the United States, the idea of “opportunity hoarding” has garnered increasing salience. When applied to explain urban inequalities, the focus of opportunity hoarding is on places—especially how residents of affluent, predominantly White residential neighborhoods or political jurisdictions are able to secure a plethora of opportunities for themselves and especially their children, at the expense of those living in less privileged places. I interrogate the account of American urban inequalities embedded within the idea of opportunity hoarding, finding it to be limited in significant ways. In light of these findings, I discuss what a superior account of urban inequalities might look like, and suggest how this account points toward potentially more efficacious strategies to attack these inequalities, perhaps ushering in a more just future for American cities and metros.

Scale-Descale-Rescale – An Emerging Analytical Tool

Understanding multi-scale interactions and their effects across spatial, temporal, and organizational scales are important aspects of designing effective environmental governance policies. Problems of scale are intrinsic to environmental governance, where managing natural resources across political jurisdictions and biophysical scales is a familiar theme in the complex human–environment relations (Cash et al. 2006, Newig & Moss, 2017). Some agreement has emerged that scale is fundamentally a relational concept that is socially constructed and both fluid and fixed (Norman et al. 2015) and must therefore be considered when analyzing effectiveness of environmental governance policies. However, what form such an analysis should take to accurately capture the multifaceted relations and interactions, remains an open question. Given that policies designed for environmental governance often carry objectives at larger geophysical scales of resource management, the design and implementation strategies of such policies must include better description of how different design aspects and implementation measures lead towards long-term sustainability and equitable outcomes (Syed & Choudhury, 2018).

Technology entrepreneurship and innovation hubs: Perspectives on the universal regulatory sandbox

Abstract In the USA, state governments have long focused on how they can provide an attractive operating environment for enterprises to locate and expand business operations within their respective political jurisdiction. In recent years, however, a new focus of state governments is on nurturing technology entrepreneurship creating long-term organizational success that translates into sustainable local- and state-level economic growth. To this end, there has been an expansion of ‘innovation hubs’ across the country. These innovation hubs are considered local and regional ‘laboratories’ for technology-focused, entrepreneurial businesses to gestate their new products and services within state-level political boundaries. A recently emerging phenomenon has been the development of the ‘regulatory sandbox’ concept as a further enhancement of the public policy operating environment for nurturing technology entrepreneurship, with a further conceptual extension—to the ‘universal regulatory sandbox’—now being legislatively enacted and implemented.

가사사건의 국제재판관할에 관한 개정 국제사법의 검토

The revised act on private international law was promulgated on January 4, 2022, by passing the plenary session of the National Assembly on December 9, 2021, and is implemented on July 5, 2022. This revision of private international law is intended to materialize Article 2 of the past private international law (Act No. 13759, before being fully amended as of January 4, 2022, hereinafter referred to as 'past private international law') about international judicial jurisdiction.
 Many attempts have paid off, and this amendment contains new details and details of international judicial jurisdiction to the extent that it is a new enactment of the law. One thing to keep in mind when determining the international jurisdiction in domestic cases is that the person at procedural inferiority must be protected. In particular, in domestic non-litigation cases where there is no other party, the review must be made in terms of guaranteeing the basic procedural rights of persons who will become warded persons or minors who are not formal parties but are the actual parties who will receive the effect of the trial directly. Each case should be reviewed to determine the existence of international jurisdiction.
 Since the revised private international law stipulates more political jurisdiction, especially in domestic cases, after the amended law goes into effect in the future, private international law is first applied to determine the existence of international judicial jurisdiction, and the In cases where the exercise is inappropriate, the case will be resolved in a way that faithfully embodies the idea of the distribution of international jurisdiction in individual cases by not exercising the jurisdiction as an exception. Through this, it is expected that the predictability of the court and the parties in international domestic cases can be greatly improved, and it is expected that it will greatly contribute to guaranteeing legal stability in the process. However, since international jurisdictional rules change with the times and circumstances, it is necessary to reexamine the international jurisdictional rules in the future.

Safety and privacy regulations for unmanned aerial vehicles: A multiple comparative analysis

With the growth of commercial and recreational use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones), there is increasing attention to the need for regulation. A systematic review is conducted using a multiple comparative perspective: across three political jurisdictions (the United States, the European Union, and Japan) and across two areas of societal implication and policy (i.e., privacy and safety), with additional comparisons drawn from regulations for related cyber-physical systems. The multiple comparative analysis conducted in this paper shows that safety is a much more salient concern than privacy. Moreover, safety is focused on technical features of the UAVs, registration and certification, and differentiation by use case. Privacy regulations tend to follow broader digital privacy guidelines. Although there are some privacy rules that are UAV-specific, many of them do not yet directly address privacy challenges that are specific for UAVs. Additional comparisons with safety and privacy policies for automated vehicles and the smart grid reveal areas of potential development for harmonization and policy guidance. The study concludes with ten recommendations for future policy development.

Integrative monitoring strategy for marine and freshwater harmful algal blooms and toxins across the freshwater-to-marine continuum.

Many coastal states throughout the USA have observed negative effects in marine and estuarine environments caused by cyanotoxins produced in inland waterbodies that were transported downstream or produced in the estuaries. Estuaries and other downstream receiving waters now face the dual risk of impacts from harmful algal blooms (HABs) that occur in the coastal ocean as well as those originating in inland watersheds. Despite this risk, most HAB monitoring efforts do not account for hydrological connections in their monitoring strategies and designs. Monitoring efforts in California have revealed the persistent detection of cyanotoxins across the freshwater-to-marine continuum. These studies underscore the importance of inland waters as conduits for the transfer of cyanotoxins to the marine environment and highlight the importance of approaches that can monitor across hydrologically connected waterbodies. A HAB monitoring strategy is presented for the freshwater-to-marine continuum to inform HAB management and mitigation efforts and address the physical and hydrologic challenges encountered when monitoring in these systems. Three main recommendations are presented based on published studies, new datasets, and existing monitoring programs. First, HAB monitoring would benefit from coordinated and cohesive efforts across hydrologically interconnected waterbodies and across organizational and political boundaries and jurisdictions. Second, a combination of sampling modalities would provide the most effective monitoring for HAB toxin dynamics and transport across hydrologically connected waterbodies, from headwater sources to downstream receiving waterbodies. Third, routine monitoring is needed for toxin mixtures at the land-sea interface including algal toxins of marine origins as well as cyanotoxins that are sourced from inland freshwater or produced in estuaries. Case studies from California are presented to illustrate the implementation of these recommendations, but these recommendations can also be applied to inland states or regions where the downstream receiving waterbody is a freshwater lake, reservoir, or river. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2023;19:586-604. © 2022 The Authors. Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Society of Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (SETAC).