James Evans

‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Lower Your Carbon Footprint!’ — Urban Laboratories and the Governance of Low-Carbon Futures

The increasing threat of climate change has created a pressing need for cities to lower their carbon footprints. Urban laboratories are emerging in numerous cities around the world as a strategy for local governments to partner with public and private property owners to reduce carbon emissions, while simultaneously stimulating economic growth. In this article, we use insights from laboratory studies to analyse the notion of urban laboratories as they relate to experimental governance, the carbonization agenda and the transition to low-carbon economies. We present a case study of the Oxford Road corridor in Manchester in the UK that is emerging as a low-carbon urban laboratory, with important policy implications for the citys future. The corridor is a bounded space where a public-private partnership comprised of the City Council, two universities and other large property owners is redeveloping the physical infrastructure and installing monitoring equipment to create a recursive feedback loop intended to facilitate adaptive learning. This low-carbon urban laboratory represents a classic sustainable development formula for coupling environmental protection with economic growth, using innovation and partnership as principal drivers. However, it also has significant implications in reworking the interplay of knowledge production and local governance, while reinforcing spatial differentiation and uneven participation in urban development.

Social learning from public engagement: dreaming the impossible?

Learning that transcends participation processes is critical if public engagement is to translate into a legacy of enhanced environmental citizenship. However, a lack of empirical evidence has limited discussion to date to largely ‘aspirational’ claims. This paper offers the first rigorous examination of whether public participation does generate beyond-process social learning. Initially we review the literature on public participation and environmental citizenship to identify the key dimensions of social learning. We then re-visit a well-worked case study of an innovative public engagement process on the Hampshire waste strategy from the 1990s. Approximately one third of the original participants have been interviewed to identify whether and how the experience had a lasting effect on them. Key methodological difficulties are discussed, not least the analytical difficulties of attributing learning to a process that happened ten years previously. However, we argue that there is evidence that both instrumental and communicative learning have taken place, and conclude by identifying key areas that require further research.

Exploring the role of private wildlife ranching as a conservation tool in South Africa: stakeholder perspectives

Rich in biological diversity, South Africas natural habitats are internationally recognized as a conservation priority. Biodiversity loss continues, however, and limited scope to enlarge the state- protected areas, combined with funding shortages for public parks, means that conservationists are increasingly turning to private landowners for solutions. The recent boom in privately owned wildlife ranches in South Africa has the potential to contribute to conservation in South Africa. This paper explores the benefits, limitations, and challenges of private wildlife ranching as a tool for conservation in South Africa through interviews with key stakeholders working within conservation and wildlife ranching, and through case studies of threatened species programs. Respondents suggested that wildlife ranches contribute to conservation positively by maintaining natural areas of habitat and by providing resources to support reintroduction programs for threatened species. However, they reported a number of limitations centered on three themes that generally arise due to the commercial nature of wildlife ranching: (1) tourist preferences drive the industry, (2) predators are persecuted to protect valuable game, and (3) inadequate resources are made available for professional conservation management and planning on ranches. In addition to challenges of combining economic gain with conservation objectives, ranchers face a number of challenges that arise because of the small, enclosed character of many ranches in South Africa, including the need to intensively manage wildlife populations. In order to enhance the role of wildlife ranching within conservation, clear guidance and support for ranchers is likely to be required to boost endorsement and minimize economic loss to ranchers.

Rethinking sustainable urban regeneration: ambiguity, creativity, and the shared territory

Despite its broad definition, the concept of sustainability has become central to regeneration policy in the UK. A growing body of research, however, suggests that the policy goals of urban regeneration and sustainable development are not being integrated in practice. Ambiguity surrounding what ‘sustainability’ actually means is often cited as the reason why projects fail to achieve policy goals. We seek to make an innovative contribution to this debate, arguing that sustainability does make a positive difference in practice, and that it is necessary to develop approaches that capture these ‘actually existing sustainabilities’. Using a detailed case study of a multistakeholder regeneration project, we develop a more positive analysis of the role which ambiguity plays in the development process. We advance a dialogic conception of sustainability based upon Michel Bakhtins sociolinguistic theory of the word as a ‘shared territory’. We suggest that the notion of sustainability acts as a shared territory for meaning around which diverse stakeholder groups coalesce, and show how the ambiguity inherent in this shared conception can generate more creative (and sustainable) outcomes to developmental challenges. Viewing sustainability as a shared territory makes ambiguity not only intelligible, but also desirable to the development process, and it is argued that there is a need to avoid the reduction of sustainability to the assessment of predetermined benchmarks or policy goals, both within the regeneration literature and across studies of planning policy and practice more generally.

Urban regeneration, governance and the state: exploring notions of distance and proximity

Recent debates over how to characterise the governance of urban regeneration are developed in this paper using a detailed case study of Attwood Green in Birmingham, UK. Specifically, the relationship between actors within governance networks and the state is critically reappraised. The case study suggests that actors tend to display highly reflexive understandings of government as multifaceted and multidimensional, simultaneously trying to establish distance and proximity from different aspects of state power. The relationship between those agents regenerating Attwood Green and local and central government is highly strategic, manipulating transfers of financial, political and legal power through new organisational configurations.

Selling conservation? Scientific legitimacy and the commodification of conservation tourism.

Conservation tourism is a rapidly growing subsector of ecotourism that engages paying volunteers as active participants in conservation projects. Once the preserve of charities, the sector now hosts a proliferation of private companies seeking to make money by selling international conservation work to tourists as a commodity. The commodification of conservation depends upon balancing the scientific legitimacy of projects against the need to offer desirable tourist experiences. Drawing on interviews with UK tour operators and their counterparts in South Africa who run the conservation projects, we explore the transnational geography of commercial conservation tourism, charting how scientific legitimacy is constructed and negotiated within the industry. Although conservation tourism makes trade-offs between scientific rigor and neoliberal market logic, it is a partial and plural process that resists simple categorization. We conclude by considering the difference that commodification makes to conservation science, and vice versa.

Rescue Geography: Place Making, Affect and Regeneration

This paper brings together two previously disengaged literatures on affect and place in order to investigate the importance of embodiment in transforming spaces into places. This brings into sharp relief the mismatch between policy rhetoric on the importance of sense of place and the outputs of regeneration schemes which often seem deliberately to efface these affective connections. The paper outlines the idea of ‘rescue geography’ as a technique for capturing the embodied relationship between communities and urban spaces prior to redevelopment. A case study using walked interviews in Birmingham’s Eastside district is discussed. It is concluded that capturing existing place associations can help to create more authentic regeneration schemes which respond sympathetically to landscapes already soaked in affective connections.

Carbon Claims and Energy Landscapes: Exploring the Political Ecology of Biomass

Abstract The greatest proportion (83%) of renewable energy in the UK is derived from biomass. Despite this there has been little debate over the potential landscape impacts of biomass, and the sector is characterized by considerable levels of uncertainty. This paper explores the ways in which biomass is framed within the carbon debate, interrogating the trade-offs and conflicts surrounding the production of dedicated and subsidized energy crops. Drawing upon a political ecology framework, we seek to explore the difference that a specific energy crop, Miscanthus, makes in current debates over bioenergy. We outline how the ecology of the plant plays a critical role in structuring the political, ecological and economic adoption of biomass energy, focusing on its status as a new species in the UK. Taking a case study of a Yorkshire landscape long dominated by coal, we explore the context of recent developments in biomass energy. Through this case study we examine how the uncertain ecology of Miscanthus undermines claims concerning the economic viability of biomass, and trace how the potential production of an ‘alien’ landscape creates a series of social and ecological tensions. The paper concludes by reflecting upon the political ecology of carbon, suggesting that the example of this energy crop highlights the way in which carbon tends to be fetishized, or removed from its social, ecological and (thus) place specific context, within current energy debates.

A Manifesto for Cyborg Pedagogy

This paper seeks to give an impression of what can happen if teachers encourage their students to take personally the issues they study, and to think and to write about how their identities and everyday lives are inseparable from the kinds of issues studied in the geography classroom. It discusses three principles – situated knowledge, cyborg ontologies and border pedagogy – which have guided the organisation of an undergraduate course on the geographies of material culture. This attempts to get students to think through their connections with the lives of distant others through simple acts of consumption, and the responsibilities which they might therefore have. This paper illustrates the kinds of student writing that can come out of such a course and the ways in which this issue of responsibility should be, and is, talked about.

The Challenge of Regulating Private Wildlife Ranches for Conservation in South Africa

We address the new attempts at regulating wildlife ranches on private land in South Africa. Although positive conservation impacts can be attributed to private wildlife ranching, there are a number of ecological consequences that often arise as a result of economic priorities. We present and analyze new national regulations aimed at coordinating provincial legislation and guiding the wildlife industry in a more conservationist direction, and examine tensions that have arisen between different sociopolitical scales as a result. Data were obtained through a desk-based study of legal documents and interviews with key stakeholders. The new regulations begin to address international obligations and national policy on biodiversity conservation by potentially combating a number of specific ecological problems associated with wildlife ranching. However, in practice, the regulations are a significant source of tension among stakeholders and will be challenging to implement. A key issue is competing agendas between incentivedriven ranchers and conservationist aims. It may be that in addressing the ecological problems at the margin, the new regulations will encourage some ranchers to convert their land away from conservation friendly land use.