Nicholas Gill

The global trend towards devolution and its implications.

Globalisation has been accompanied by an equally global tendency towards devolution of authority and resources from nation-states to regions and localities that takes on various forms, depending upon which actors are driving the decentralisation efforts. The existence of a general trend towards devolution also has significant implications for efficiency, equity, and administration. The authors outline first the general drive towards devolution and then proceed to examine which countries are experiencing which forms of decentralisation. A theoretical argument emphasising the role of governmental legitimacy across various tiers of government is used to explain the diversity of devolution initiatives, drawing on examples that include Brazil, Mexico, India, China, the USA, and some European countries. Having supported their model of decentralisation, the authors then examine the implications of the widespread downward transfer of power towards regions. Some of the less widely discussed pitfalls of decentralisation are presented; caution in promoting devolutionary efforts is the prescription of this paper.

On the ‘economic dividend’ of devolution

Rodríguez‐Pose A. and Gill N. (2005) On the ‘economic dividend’ of devolution, Regional Studies 39 , 405–420. Recent political and academic discourse about devolution has tended to stress the economic advantages of the transfer of power from national to subnational institutions. This ‘economic dividend’ arises through devolved administrations’ ability to tailor policies to local needs, generate innovation in service provision through inter‐territorial competition, and stimulate participation and accountability by reducing the distance between those in power and their electorates. This paper, however, outlines two related caveats. First, there are many forces that accompany devolution and work in an opposite direction. Devolved governmental systems may carry negative implications in terms of national economic efficiency and equity as well as through the imposition of significant institutional burdens. Second, the economic gains, as well as the downsides, that devolution may engender are contingent, to some extent, upon which governmental tier is dominating, organizing, propagating and driving the devolutionary effort.

Is there a global link between regional disparities and devolution

In this paper we present an examination of the possible correlation between rising income inequalities at the regional level and widespread devolutionary initiatives worldwide. When the responsibility and resource-based facets of decentralisation are taken together a marked congruency is evident between the two trends. Various spatial economic forces promote the emergence of core and peripheral regions, and devolution, by establishing the autonomy of these regions, allows these forces a greater impact. We argue that this is because decentralisation initiatives carry with them implicit fiscal, political, and administrative costs, which fall more heavily upon those regions with limited adjustment capacities, resulting in differential rates at which regions can capitalise upon the opportunities offered by devolution. The global tendency towards devolution therefore reflects a subtle, but profound, renunciation of the traditional equalisation role of national government in favour of conditions fostering economic and public competition and leading to greater development of initially rich and powerful regions to the detriment of poorer areas.

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia ☆

Description: Over the past 15 years, Bosnia and Herzegovina has served as a laboratory of techniques to re–establish state sovereignty and promote democracy. The post–conflict intervention in Bosnia has justifiably received great interest from political theorists and scholars of international relations who have explored the limitations of the institutions and policies of international intervention. This book begins from an alternative premise: rather than examining institutions or charting limitations, Jeffrey argues for a focus on the performance of state sovereignty in Bosnia as it has been practiced by a range of actors both within and beyond the Bosnian state. In focusing on the state as a process, he argues that Bosnian sovereignty is best understood as a series of improvisations that have attempted to produce and reproduce a stable and unified state. Based on four periods of residential fieldwork in Bosnia, The Improvised State advances state theory through an illumination of the fragile and contingent nature of sovereignty in contemporary Bosnia and its grounding in the everyday lives of the Bosnian citizen.

New state-theoretic approaches to asylum and refugee geographies

This paper examines recent innovations in the way the concept of the state is employed by geographers researching forced migrants’ and refugees’ experiences. A still-dominant body of thought tends to essentialize the state and foreground both its institutional forms and coercive powers by asking questions that take the primacy of these attributes for granted. In response, poststructuralist geographers and sociologists have begun to forge alternative views of states, drawing upon a useful cynicism over the coherence of the state, as well as an engagement with Foucauldian notions of governmentality. The paper examines these alternative approaches in order to distil the characteristics of an emerging critical asylum geography.

Pathologies of migrant place-making: the case of Polish migrants to the UK

The author argues that migrant place-making can become counterproductive for migrant communities for a variety of reasons. Existing place-making literature is often optimistic about the ability of places to offer migrants common identities and means of mobilising collectively. The author constructs a four-stage general model of migrant place-making to examine the potential pathologies of migrant organisational strategies at each of these four stages. In order to demonstrate the use of this model, an analysis of post-2004 Polish migration to the UK, drawing upon forty-two semistructured interviews with Polish migrants and domestic service providers, is presented. Although earlier migration displayed a number of the ideal characteristics of positive place-making described in the ideal four-stage model, centring around the Polish Catholic churches of England and Wales, post-2004 migration has introduced a series of problems that illustrate the various pathologies that can occur. The author concludes by calling for (i) a greater appreciation of the role of host organisations in the production of successful and unsuccessful place-making, and (ii) a recognition that place-making as a migrant settlement strategy is deeply fallible at various stages of its development.

Introduction: Mobilities and Forced Migration

Abstract Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This article introduces the special issue by setting out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.

Nothing personal? : geographies of governing and activism in the British asylum system

Series Editors Preface viii List of Figures ix Acronyms xi Acknowledgements xii 1 Introduction 1 2 Moral Distance and Bureaucracy 21 3 Distant Bureaucrats 48 4 Distance at Close Quarters 76 5 Indifference Towards Suffering Others During Sustained Contact 107 6 Indifference and Emotions 135 7 Examining Compassion 156 8 Conclusion 179 Methodological Appendix 191 References 196 Index 216

Attendance and Performance: Correlations and Motives in Lecture-Based Modules

Does attending lectures improve student performance? Using novel attendance data, we examine statistically the relationships between attendance and performance for first-year and third-year students. The relationship is moderately positive: very high attendance is significantly associated with an improvement in performance over very low attenders of between 5.3 and 12.8 per cent, depending on circumstances. Then, we provide qualitative evidence from in-depth interviews with students about their views and motives regarding lectures. We find a range of reasons why attendance may be less than complete, and conclude that attendance is related to performance in complex ways.

Introduction: Polymorphic Borders

ABSTRACT Polymorphic borders. Territory, Politics, Governance. Conceptualizing the respatialization, rescaling and mobilization of border work is a central problem in current borders research. Traditional and ubiquitous border concepts imply a coherent state power belied by much contemporary research. In this introduction to the special issue on ‘Polyphorphic Borders’ we suggest that not only do empirical studies of border work reveal a much more fragmented and chaotic world of bordering that is more guided by site- and agent-specific contingencies than by grand schemes, but also that representing borders as ubiquitous calls forth the state as coherent, monstrous, omnipotent and omniscient. Rather than being either strictly tied to the territorial margins of the states or ubiquitous throughout the entire territory of states, bordering takes on a variety of forms, agents, sites, practices and targets. We propose reconceptualizing borders as polymorphic, or taking on a multiplicity of mutually non-exclusive forms at the same time. In this introduction we propose the metaphor of polymorphic borders in order to account for the respatialization of border work beyond and within traditional borders in a way that avoids viewing borders as either lines, or everywhere. The articles that follow elaborate polymorphic borders through ethnographic investigations of border work at various sites and scales.