Kate Maclean

Climate change perceptions and responses in Scotland's ski industry

The negative impacts of climate change for the ski industry have been well documented. However, research has largely focused on key ski markets in North America and Continental Europe. The study presented in this paper addresses climate change perceptions and responses in the more marginal ski destination of Scotland. Using a qualitative, interpretivist methodology, this paper contributes through a local-scale, single-site study of a ski area where technical adaptations are not utilised and which therefore relies on business responses to climate change. Findings suggest that while local weather is perceived to be a large and unmanageable risk to the industry, and a downward trend is identified in terms of snow reliability, these risks are not perceived to be connected to the wider anthropogenic climate change discourse. Waiting for knowledge to increase before taking adaptive action appears to be the most popular business strategy; however, autonomous adaptation is taking place in the form of business diversification, which mitigates against risks including, but not limited to, climate change. This paper concludes that experiences and perceptions of climate change will be highly localised and as a result so too will adaptive behaviours. Marginal ski destinations such as Scotland will be facing a range of non-climatic impacts which will contribute to their contextual vulnerability to climate change and capacity to adapt.

A Post-Washington Consensus Approach to Local Economic Development in Latin America? An Example from Medellín, Colombia

This paper looks at the radical policies introduced in Medellin, in Colombia, to promote local development and social inclusion. While not always successful, the paper finds that they hold out a useful foundation for further reforms and measures to build local economic development success and social inclusion.

Evo's jumper: identity and the used clothes trade in ‘post-neoliberal’ and ‘pluri-cultural’ Bolivia

Since the election of Latin Americas first indigenous president, Evo Morales, in 2005, Bolivias ruling party, the ‘Movement Towards Socialism’, has nationalised resources and instituted a ‘post-neoliberal’ and ‘pluri-cultural’ constitution that emphasises the importance of recognising cultural, linguistic and economic plurality. This article explores gendered economic identities in this context via the case study of an informal trade that is explicitly excluded from this vision of development: the globally controversial used clothes trade (UCT). In Bolivia, political debate on the trade demonstrates gendered tensions inherent in the governments ‘post-neoliberal’ agenda of nationalisation, protection of cultural identity and the well-being of the poor in an increasingly liberalised and globalised market place. Working with women in the city of El Alto, this article examines how womens involvement in the UCT challenges understandings of identity and development in post-neoliberal Latin America and the dynamics involved in womens continued marginalisation from global economic and political processes.

New Political Spaces

Despite the continued dominance in many ways of traditional elites, political spaces have emerged in Medellin over the last 20 years that have enabled different political actors to have a seat at the table, influence the agenda, and in some cases gain power within the formal mechanisms of local government. The contention here is that in these new political spaces is seen the real potential of the miracle, as they represent a disruption to the long-standing elite dominance of the city’s politics and economy. This chapter explores the ways in which those who were involved in the seminars, working groups, and coalitions that emerged in the wake of the crisis were able to make use of these fora. A more participatory approach to politics developed over this time that challenged clientelism and the lack of a clear demarcation between formal and informal politics that had underpinned the prevalence of violence. The forms of leadership and power that emerged represent a change in the values that frame ideas of authority and power and in the role of violence in establishing authority.

(Mis)use of evidence in microfinance programming in the global south: a critique

This paper looks at the use of economic and social ‘evidence’ in debates on microfinance. Microfinance was originally inspired by small-scale womens savings and credit organisations. When its potential to become a financially sustainable, even profit-making, development intervention was recognised, microfinance underwent a ‘revolution’ that was to convert it into a much lauded development ‘panacea’. Microfinances reputation has, however, been tarnished by reports refuting the evidential basis for claims made on its behalf. We trace the interventions ascendance and the evidential basis on which microfinance was promoted. We argue, firstly, that the exclusion of qualitative evidence was not an epistemological imperative, but a political choice, and, secondly, that the large-scale quantitative evidence that did support the scaling up of microfinance was inadequate in terms of methodological rigour. In concluding, we place the example of microfinance within wider debates on evidence in development and argue that evidence can never be apolitical.

Gender, risk and the Wall Street Alpha Male

From the outset, analyses of the 2008 financial crisis, in mainstream as well as feminist discussions, have been gendered. In particular, rampant risk taking in an unregulated environment, widely deemed to be a principle cause of the crash, has been associated with masculine characteristics. In this article, I explore how the concepts of gender and risk entwine in two films on the financial crisis – The Other Guys and Margin Call. By looking at how gender is used to dramatise financial risk, I explore how understandings of high-risk behaviour are gendered, and the implications this has in the context of finance. Fictional representations mediate public understanding of this notoriously complex field as the number of films and documentaries on the crisis demonstrates. Exploring how gender is used to communicate risk reminds us that risk taking is part of a performance of masculinity that needs to be established by constructing a feminine, risk-averse other. The contention of this paper is that, to address gender bias in finance and the economy, gendered meanings of risk need to be openly challenged, and cultural and material analyses of gendered inequality brought into dialogue.

Gendering the city: the lived experience of transforming cities, urban cultures and spaces of belonging

Abstract Debates centred on ‘planetary urbanisation’ have raised questions over the adequacy of existing theories and epistemologies to explain the quantitative and qualitative transformations of cities. However, this theorization of the urban has met with opposition from post-colonial and feminist researchers amongst others. The comparative, empirical research in this collection, from Bolivia, India and Turkey, highlights that the city remains an important analytical and concrete framework, demarcated by contingency and cultural change through which residents must navigate. In particular we focus on the specificity of women’s lives and their capacity to problematise universalist theory, documenting their interrogation of simplistic binaries such as modern/traditional; their innovative approaches to informal settlement, housing and markets; their production of urban knowledge in order to negotiate the city; and processes and practices of mobility, experimentation, risk taking and aspiration that contest or support a myriad of urban imaginaries. Whilst not rejecting the need for theories that allow comparative perspectives on cities, our conclusions underscore the importance of recognising the multiple logics that generate city space and urban cultures, and the consequent need to parochialise the empirical basis of theories that claim to be global in outreach.

Medellín: The Most Violent City in the World

Throughout the twentieth century, Colombia was plagued by violence, as a bitter civil war was fought between the Liberal and Conservative parties, over a period which also saw the formation of Marxist guerrilla groups and paramilitary groups. However, violence in Medellin in the 1980s greatly exceeded levels of violence in the rest of the country and is particularly associated with the rise to power of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel. This chapter analyses the factors involved in Medellin’s violence in terms of how violence became part of the processes via which power and authority were gained in the city. High levels of inequality, insecurity, and exclusion contributed to a context in which the cartel, urban militia, and paramilitary groups were able to gain power by promising work, upward mobility, and security. However, the role of the State in direct military action in certain civilian areas, political populism, and a blurring of formal and informal politics, as well as legitimate and illegitimate authority, are crucial and often overlooked factors in understanding Medellin’s violence.

The Miracle? Social Urbanism

This chapter places social urbanism in a global context by examining the policies associated with the ‘Medellin Miracle’ alongside urban regeneration interventions from other ‘model cities’, including most notably Barcelona. City branding has become a global business as cities compete for foreign investment and various ‘mega-events’ such as the Olympics. Policies to achieve model city status tend to include the types of project that have been central to social urbanism: mass transport systems, public space, public art, and iconic buildings. Medellin is, however, exceptional in that these policies were designed, promoted, and enacted in a context of extreme violence, inequality, exclusion, and informality. The argument here is that the relationship between urban regeneration policies and violence needs to be understood in terms of whether the power struggles underpinning violence in the city have changed.

Behind the Miracle

This chapter analyses the political and economic changes, discourses, and dynamics that allowed leftist community leaders, social organisations, and activists to sit at a table with the city’s elites to develop and eventually implement social urbanism. During the 1990s, a number of changes at the global and national scales influenced narco-traffic and the struggles between guerrilla, paramilitary, and State actors in Colombia, and the Medellin Miracle needs to be understood in the context of the complex history of Colombia’s trajectory towards democracy. Key points in this trajectory include electoral reform and, crucially, the country’s new Constitution in 1991, but these steps have been accompanied by many other influences that have either reinforced or attenuated Colombia’s democratic progress both politically and economically, and the political processes behind the miracle in Medellin reflect these dynamics of progress and revanchism.