Avenues (The World School): the road to a global geography of education?

March 12, 2013

by Fiona Ferbrache

learningAs I walk by my former primary school on a Tuesday early morning, the current pupils must be gathered in assembly for I can hear the School hymn.  Schooled in Guernsey, I studied the Bailiwick of Guernsey’s Curriculum and my education was embedded, to a large extent, in local Island (one might say national) context.

‘National’ or ‘state’ level schools tend to be considered as mainstream organisations for learning (Kraftl 2012).  They teach about the world beyond their state borders, but rarely embed themselves internationally.  This point is made by the team behind Avenues: an alternative educational establishment based in New York.

Avenues, subtitled ‘The World School’, opened its first campus in September 2012.  It is envisaged that this international school will expand to include more than 20 campuses around the globe, in places such as Singapore, London, Paris, Mumbai and São Paulo.  When this integrated global learning community is established, students will be able to take advantage of a singular leaning system to spend short periods at different campuses around the world.  This physical mobility is part of the essential criteria through which Avenues aims to “prepare students for global life”.

With its global philosophy, perhaps Avenues could be conceived as a form of education beyond the mainstream (this is not an unusual perspective in current media articles on the school).  If so, then it contributes to what Kraftl (2012:1) calls “geographies of ‘alternative’ education”.  While Kraftl’s focus remains on UK-based homeschooling, and draws upon themes of emotion and affect, and family and home, his article clearly demonstrates some of the political, social and academic values associated with alternative sites for learning.

Could we see Avenues and its potential global networks analysed in geographies of education at some point in the future?

60-world2  Avenues: The World School

60-world2  Education: Move Over Dalton. The Economist (online). 01 September 2012

books_icon  Collins D and Coleman T (2008) Social geographies of education: looking within, and beyond, school boundaries Geography Compass 2 281–99

books_icon  Kraftl, P. (2012) Towards geographies of ‘alternative’ education: a case study of UK home schooling families. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00536.x

60-world2  World class: a superschool for the global age. The Telegraph (online). 04 February 2013

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Posted by fionaferbrache

New Geographies of Animal Subjectivity

February 25, 2013

By Martin Mahony

Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger from Wind in the Willows by Paul Bransom (Image:Wind in the Willows (1913).djvu, page 326) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The identity, experiences and and behaviour of animals – in short, their subjectivity – has been a topic of great media interest of late. The scandal over the discovery of horse meat throughout the European food chain has raised serious questions not only about the seeming opacity of the meat industry, but also about our cultural relations to particular species. The illicit substitution of meat from one herbivorous quadruped for that of another has produced outrage of both a political and ethical kind, pointing towards particular culturally-embedded understandings of animal subjectivities. Likewise, the debate about the culling of badgers to prevent the spread of bovine tuberculosis in the UK has often proceeded through contrasting framings of badgers as vicious pests and as lovable woodland critters. These framings, in turn, can be traced back to literary presentations of badgers of works such as The Wind in the Willows – as the BBC’s Roger Harrabin reports in his interview with Angela Cassidy of Imperial College, London.

These themes of human-animal relationships have long been of interest to geographers. Agriculture and the food industry are interesting spaces where human-nature relationships are played out in a variety of material, economic, scientific and ethical ways. The field of ‘animal geographies’ has interrogated the networks which tie humans and animals together in ways which transcend conventional dualisms of ‘human’ and ‘nature’ and which pose challenging questions to the distinction between animals as economic or scientific objects, and animals as conscious, feeling subjects.

As reported by Connie Johnston in a new paper in Geography Compass, the recent evolution of the question of animal subjectivity has been an important feature of the farm animal welfare debate. Animal welfare has become an object of state regulation in the EU and US, with new branches of regulatory science interacting with forms of animal rights activism to construct new categories of animal subjectivity and emotion. Drawing on the geography of science literature, Johnston suggests that we need to trace the knowledges and norms of animal welfare through various spaces of knowledge production – from geopolitical units such as the EU, through the immediate living environments of farm animals, to the very ‘location’ of animal subjectivity, such as neuronal architectures. Johnston hints at sources of difference in how animal welfare is governed in the EU and US, such as different legal landscapes and economic priorities, and argues for further research to clarify and explain the different ways in which animal subjectivity is constructed in different places.

As the recent cases of badgers and horses show, animal subjectivities – or rather, human constructions of them – are deeply cultural affairs. Attempts to determine an absolute ‘essence’ of animal subjectivity often founder, and thus geographical scholarship has the potential to contribute to our understandings of how such categories are constructed, and the political and ethical work they do for us in highly charged debates about our food and about our relationship with the nonhuman.

world_icon Horsemeat scandal: the essential guide, The Guardian, 15th February 2013

world_icon Badgers: Splitting opinion for more than 200 years, BBC News, 11th October 2012

books_icon Connie L. Johnston, 2013, Geography, Science, and Subjectivity: Farm Animal Welfare in the United States and Europe, Geography Compass 7 139-148

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Posted by mwfmahony

Affecting Our Physique: The Place of Obesity

February 18, 2013

by Jen Turner

By Octagon (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Research carried out with people living in Colorado, US, has found that Americans who lived well above sea level were less likely to be obese than those in low-lying areas.  Reported in the Mail (online), Lead researcher Dr Jameson Voss, from Uniformed Services University in Maryland, said: “I was surprised by the magnitude of the effect… I wasn’t expecting such a consistent pattern as what was emerging.” The study based on data from 400,000 people living in Colorado illustrated that a person’s obesity risk dropped with every 660ft increase in elevation.

To examine obesity rates at different altitudes, the researchers combined information from several databases, including a telephone health survey of 422,603 Americans from 2011. The researchers had information on 236 people who lived at the highest altitude of at least 9,800 feet above sea level. Those people tended to smoke less, eat healthier and exercise more.

The researchers also had information on 322,681 people who lived in the lowest altitude range – less than 1,600ft above sea level. After taking into account other factors that could influence the results such as retirement age, the researchers found adults living in the lowest altitude range had a Body Mass Index (BMI) – a measurement of weight in relation to height – of 26.6. That compared to people who lived in the highest altitude range, who had a BMI of 24.2. A healthy BMI falls between 18.5 and 24.9.

Dr Voss considered that the associations persist over the long term, with changes in elevation perhaps affecting appetite hormones, growth and how many calories the body burned. These findings could help explain the difference in obesity rates between states.  However, the results are unable to conclude whether moving to an area of high altitude would mean you would automatically loss your excess weight.  It would be interesting to study whether obesity prevalence would change if the research participants moved to a lower altitude.

The rapid rise in obesity rates over the last 30 years has been considerably noteworthy for geographers due to its profound implications for the health of populations. A recent paper by Dianna M. Smith, and Steven Cummins explains that, as this rise has occurred over a relatively short biological time scale, it is suggested that changes in the environments to which we are exposed may be to blame, rather than individual genetic endowment. Focusing on developed world nations, this article briefly reviews this emerging ‘ecological’ perspective in the search for the causes of obesity. This article explores how aspects of our environment might disrupt ‘energy balance’ through influencing food consumption and physical activity. It focuses on three hypothesised pathways for environmental risk: the organisation of built physical space, the social environment and the political environment. The article demonstrates that a consideration of scale and context are also important in the search for the environmental drivers of weight gain. For the discerning geographer, these inherent relationships between physical spaces and the body continue to be of interest; with this particular topic generating another avenue of study surrounding the transformation of the individual through space.

books_iconDianna M. Smith, and Steven Cummins, 2008, Obese Cities: How Our Environment Shapes Overweight, Geography Compass, 3(1), 518-535.

books_iconJ D Voss, P Masuoka, B J Webber, A I Scher and R L Atkinson, 2013, Association of elevation, urbanization and ambient temperature with obesity prevalence in the United States, International Journal of Obesity, DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2013.5.

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Want to slim down? Living at a higher altitude can help (and it’s nothing to do with climbing), Mail (online), 13 February 2013.

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Posted by Jen Turner

Spatialities and Physicality of the Music Industry

January 22, 2013

By Catherine Waite

The announcement last week that the music retailer HMV had been placed into administration stimulated many debates and asked many questions about contemporary society.

In the words of the BBC the potential loss of HMV would leave a “social gap” on the high street, as one of the few remaining stores where people, stereotypically men, could go to take refuge and browse.

The British media also considered the views of those artists who make up the music industry and were traditionally reliant on retailers such as HMV to make a living. Were the chain to disappear from the high street then given the sparse locations of independent music specialists it would leave many towns without a dedicated music store, a situation that was lamented by the band ‘Everything, Everything’ as well as many other artists.

Beyond the obvious spatial changes to the high streets the closure of HMV would have near enough signalled the physical end of the music industry. Already a significant amount of music is downloaded both legally and illegally from the internet, and the loss of HMV would have left only shops such as Asda and Tesco selling any CDs in most towns.

Whilst it has now been announced that HMV has been saved from closure, the debates and issues that have been raised over the last week about the end of the physicality of the music industry, are important considerations as society becomes increasingly dependent on the internet. As this continues, and it is hard to see an alternative pathway, it is likely that it is not only the music industry that may lose its physicality.

From this case study example of HMV and the music industry it is clear that many of the key issues are geographical in nature. Research into the production and consumption of music has been the focus of a number of recent studies published in Geography Compass and Area. Similarly the changes to the urban landscape, impacts of the financial crisis and social change are all key research topics in geography. This diverse range of research subjects and current affairs can all be seen to be brought together by geography.

books_iconBrandellero, A.M.C. and Pfeffer, K. 2011 Multiple and shifting geographies of world music production Area 43:4 495-505

books_iconJazeel, T. 2005 The world is sound? Geography, musicology and British-Asian soundscapes Area 37:3 233-241

books_iconWatson, A., Hoyler, M. and Mager, C. 2009 Spaces and Networks of Musical Creativity in the City Geography Compass 3:2 856-878

60-world2BBC News HMV leaves social gap in High Street 15th January 2013

60-world2BBC News HMV: Restructuring specialist Hilco takes control of retailer 22nd January 2013

60-world2BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat Everything Everything say the era of the CD could be over 18th January 2013

60-world2BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat Stars’ view on HMV calling in the administrators 15th January 2013

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Posted by catherinewaite

Adding Fuel to the Fire: Australia’s Heatwave and Bushfire Epidemic

January 21, 2013

By Jen Dickie

Bushfire in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia by Thomas Schoch. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic licenseWhilst the UK suffered its wettest summer in 100 years and is currently under a blanket of snow, pictures showing the devastating effects of the epidemic of bushfires that have hit Australia, linked to a record breaking heatwave this January, have been appearing in the news.  In The Observer last Saturday, Alison Rourke reports how firefighters are struggling to control what have been described as the “most atrocious fire-fighting conditions in 30 years”.  A combination of high temperatures and strong winds have resulted in the situation being given a fire danger rating of ‘catastrophic’, the highest possible rating.  In a special climate statement released by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) on Monday, the heatwave event is described as being persistent and widespread, affecting large parts of central and southern Australia.  The combination of dry conditions since mid-2012 and a delay in the monsoon are thought to have exacerbated the susceptibility of the landscape to bushfires.

While Tim Flannery from The Guardian argues that these “raging wildfires are forcing many to rethink their stance on climate change”, the immediate focus is largely on the improvements in communication, weather prediction and management of the outbreaks, particularly since the tragedy in Victoria in 2009 where 173 people lost their lives.

In a paper for Geography Compass, Christopher O’Connor, Greg Garfin, Donald Falk and Thomas Swetnam review trends in human pyrogeography research, where they discuss the interactions among of fire, climate and society.  In particular, they highlight that geographers have the necessary tools to “change operational management actions and societal preparedness” and advance the study of the complex nature of pyrogeography.  They investigate, among other themes, the frequency and extent of wildfires, the role climate plays as a driver of fire occurrence and the impacts of human modification of the landscape; however, they emphasise that our current understanding of the interactions needs to be improved if we are to predict what might happen in the future.  Whether you believe in climate change or not, it seems that there have been more and more extreme weather events hitting our headlines over recent years; however, as the understanding of the complex relationships among fire, climate and society improves, hopefully society will become increasingly more prepared to deal with them in the future.

books_icon Christopher O’Connor, Gregg Garfin, Donald Falk, Thomas Swetnam, 2011, Human Pyrogeography: A New Synergy of Fire, Climate and People is Reshaping Ecosystems across the Globe, Geography Compass 5, 329-350

60-world2 As Australia heatwave hits new high, warning that bushfires will continue, The Observer, 12th Jan 2013

60-world2 As Australia burns, attitudes are changing. But is it too late? The Guardian, 11th Jan 2013

60-world2 Extreme January heat, SPECIAL CLIMATE STATEMENT 43 – INTERIM, Climate Information Services – Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, 14th Jan 2013

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Posted by Jen Dickie

Climate Change: A Little Further Round the Pragmatic Turn?

January 18, 2013

Cutting black carbon emissions from diesel exhausts would be one way to both slow global warming and cut air pollution levels.

Martin Mahony

A few weeks back I wrote a post on here which reflected on whether the outcomes of the Doha climate negotiations represented something of a ‘pragmatic turn’ in global climate policy discourse. Drawing on the Hartwell Paper - which advocates a more pragmatic set of immediate climate policy goals – I suggested that the growing interest in the multi-scalar character of climate governance and in potential ‘win-win’ strategies like soot emissions reductions (which would have benefits both for the climate and for human health) might represent an application of some of the principles of a new climate pragmatism.

Events this week suggest that we may be heading a little further round this pragmatic turn. At a conference in London, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres argued that national domestic climate legislation “is critical because it is the linchpin between action on the ground and the international agreement… domestic legislation opens the political space for international agreements and facilitates overall ambition”, as reported in The Guardian.

This marks something of an inversion of the logic which has dominated much of the history of climate governance, i.e. that national laws should be implemented under a framework of international, legally-binding agreements. For Figueres, effective national policies are now a precursor to achieving the long-desired comprehensive legal framework to tie countries together in their efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

This news was followed by reports that a group of scientists studying the aggregate effects of soot or ‘black carbon’ emissions on the climate had made some rather surprising calculations. The scientists – who spent four years compiling observations and data from around the world – suggested that the contribution of black carbon to global warming may be twice that of previous estimates. This would place black carbon second in the list of climate-warming emissions, after carbon dioxide.

For the climate pragmatists, black carbon emissions represent something of a low hanging fruit – a problem whose solution would be politically much more straightforward than the decarbonisation of the world’s energy supply. These new findings suggest that the fruit may be a little sweeter (and twice as plump) than first thought, and the renewed emphasis on multi-scalar governance may make it a little easier to reach.

However, as Bailey and Compston argued in 2010, “trajectories of climate governance are shaped by struggle and negotiations between competing sets of interests operating within and across territorial scales.. Despite the customary framing of climate change as a global problem requiring global solutions, climate governance can never be disentangled from these processes, just as international and national political strategies cannot simply be rolled out to the sub-national and local levels or between political jurisdictions. Some sources of resistance are embedded in localities and spatial scales. Others, especially those allied to corporate interests, transcend conventional spatial boundaries.”

The potential new trajectories currently emerging will not be smooth and easy paths, and the re-scaling of political efforts and the re-prioritising of specific issues will mean that new sources of resistance will be inevitably be encountered. The key premise of climate pragmatism however is that these resistances need not paralyze entire political projects, such as the search for an all-encompassing global climate agreement. Thus the confluence of a spatially sensitive approach to climate governance and a pragmatic turn in the ordering of policy goals may mean that climate-friendly and socially just policies are just around the corner.

globe42 Domestic climate laws are essential, says UN, The Guardian

globe42 Black carbon is worse for global warming than previously thought, The Guardian

books_icon Ian Bailey and Hugh Compston, 2010, Geography and the Politics of Climate Policy, Geography Compass 4 1097-1114

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Posted by mwfmahony

Reproducing ‘Authenticity’: The Politics of Restoration and Preservation

January 10, 2013

by Jen Turner

Nigel Homer [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

A recent BBC News report explained how English Heritage and Bradford Council are offering grants of up to 80% to recreate “lost” historical features along the village of Haworth, West Yorkshire made famous by the Bronte sisters. In 2010, English Heritage claimed Haworth’s traditional character was being eroded by gradual minor changes and invited business owners to suggest ideas to enhance the main street.  Councillor David Green, executive member for regeneration and economy, said Haworth was a “special place”. Bradford Council maintained that “historically accurate” details such as traditional shop fronts and sash windows could be reintroduced.

English Heritage regional director Trevor Mitchell places increased business revenues at the heart of the project, claiming that “A restored shop on Haworth Main Street will be more attractive to customers and tenants”.  For me, Howarth as a place is enchanting.  I grew up with West Yorkshire as my home and a penchant for literature that gave the town a magical appeal for me.  In my view, preserving its integrity is important – both picturesque and meaningful for me, I would hate to see its surroundings degenerate.  However, this raises an important question.  What is the definition of this ‘integrity’; and how should it manifest itself?  What processes (and the repercussions of them) should geographers attend to when considering how regeneration schemes seek to reproduce ‘authenticity’ in the contemporary environment?

It is here that I would like to make reference to a numbers of works that have emerged in recent years surrounding these issues within the discipline. As Mihalis Kavaratzis explains, cities all over the world have been applying marketing techniques and increasingly adopting a marketing philosophy to meet their operational and strategic goals; allowing  City marketing to grow into an established field of research and an academic sub-discipline.  The article outlines the historical episodes of such marketing, highlighting how branding has been influential in shaping future prospects for urban spaces.  In Howarth, the ‘Bronte Brand’ is quintessential in the marketed atmosphere of the town.  This also relates to the work of  Adrian While and Michael Short, which recognises that the built heritage of most cities is heterogeneous, hybrid and multiple.  They highlight how certain heritage objects and meanings are invariably privileged over others in place-making strategies, having impact upon the production of local heritage and the regulation and conversation of changes in the built environment.  For Geography Directions followers with interest in this field, their paper further contributes to conceptual debates about the situated politics of heritage and the institutional work performed by heritage discourse.  In aligning ourselves with these debates, it is easy to question the complex relationship between place-making, capitalism, and the ‘authenticity’ we take for granted in our favourite tourist destinations.

books_icon

Mihalis Kavaratzis, 2007, City Marketing: The Past, the Present and Some Unresolved Issues, Geography Compass, 1(3) p. 695-712.

books_icon Aidan While and Michael Short, 2011, Place narratives and heritage management: the modernist legacy in Manchester, Area, 43(1) p. 4-13.

60-world2

Effort to return Bronte authenticity to Haworth, BBC News Leeds and West Yorkshire, 5 Jan 2013.

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Posted by Jen Turner

Geographies Becoming Ship-shape: Maritime Wine Trading and Ships in Geography

January 8, 2013

by Fiona Ferbrache

BrigantineLast August, visitors strolling along Copenhagen’s quayside would have seen a rather unusual sight as 8,000 bottles of French wine were unloaded onto the quay.  As “approximately 95% of trade is still carried by ship” (Hasty & Peters 2012:669), you may ask why this should be considered out of the ordinary.  The incongruity was the manner in which these bottles had arrived in Copenhagen, for they had been transported by brigantine (a two-masted sailing vessel).  The scene was, therefore, more reminiscent of a past way of life (such as Gordon Frickers has painted of The Port of Chester (1863)), than with contemporary trade.

The brigantine transportation of these organic wines offers an eco-friendly alternative to more contemporary forms of maritime trade, which produce between 3% and 5% of global CO2 emissions.  Several small companies have been attempting to develop this potential market, in the 21st century, while promising technological developments offer further possibilities for making 19th century transportation methods more realistic today (see BBC article).

Maritime research lies on the margins of human geographical work, relative to geography’s terracentrism.  Hasty and Peters (2012) address this directly in a paper that reviews geographies of ships and calls for the centralisation of ships in future geographical research.  For example, Hasty and Peters argue that ships have been part of the creation of geographical knowledge, not least through their utility as vehicles of exploration.  The authors also argue that ships provide alternative vantage points for innovative approaches to contemporary geographical concerns such as mobilities (ships being moving objects on fluid seas, worked and inhabited by mobile persons); immobilities and more-than-human geographies.  Ships, we are encouraged to understand, matter for contemporary geography.

60-world2  Sailing into the future, BBC News, 28th December 2012

books_icon William Hasty, Kimberley Peters, 2012, The Ship in Geography and the Geographies of Ships, Geography Compass 6 660-676

books_icon Kimberley Peters, 2010, Future Promises for Contemporary Social and Cultural Geographies of the Sea, Geography Compass 4 1260-1272

books_icon Kimberley Peters, 2011, Sinking the radio ‘pirates’: exploring British strategies of governance in the North Sea, 1964–1991, Area 43 281-287

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Posted by fionaferbrache

Symbols of Art and/or Crime: The Complexities of Prison Tattoos and Other Alternative ‘Art’

December 18, 2012

by Jen Turner

By Araminta de Clermont (Araminta de Clermont) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was recently struck by the incredible images displayed in a recent article online in The Daily Mail.  The images, taken in the early 1990s by photographer Sergei Vasiliev after he gained access to some of Russia’s toughest prisons, illustrated the variety of tattoos that adorned inmates.  This was at the peak of the gang wars that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union.  Margo Demello (2000) explains that the fact that a tattoo is permanent, painful, and macho inscribes layers of meaning much beyond simply the surface of the skin.  Far from a random collection of meaningless drawings and letters, each tattoo has its own meaning and, to those who know, can be read as a curriculum vitae of its bearer’s criminal past.  For prisoners, a tattoo may symbolise membership of a certain group and one’s place in the hierarchy – which, for some, is a powerful one.  In Russian prisons, a star tattoo conveys authority, whereas leaders of Russian prisoners in the Israeli prison, are adorned with a skull impaled on a winged knife, up which a crowned snake climbs (Shoham, 2010, p. 993).  There are many other works discussing similar examples in different contexts (see Phelan and Hunt, 1998). Stripped of their jewellery and clothing, the prisoner’s body therefore becomes a marker of identity – a necessity often created by the nature of the environment they find themselves in.  The skin becomes a site for both identification and proclamation; enforcing difference through symbols that embody wider cultural ideologies.

With this in mind, I turn attention to a 2011 paper in Geography Compass by Cameron McAuliffe and Kurt Iveson.  This paper critically reviews the literature on graffiti and street art – interrogating the common dialectical positions in talk of graffiti.  McAuliffe and Iveson question whether graffiti is art or crime; public or private expression; ephemeral or permanent; cultural practice or economically important? The article goes some way to uncover the complexity of graffiti’s dynamic and contested geographies.  In the context of today’s discussion the ensuing debates are strikingly similar.  With the practising of tattooing prohibited within prisons, the presence of this body graffiti develops interesting parallels with the sub-culture of artwork that finds itself displayed around urban centres.  Thus, in concluding this short piece it appears there may be call for a similar interrogation into the dialectics of other alternative art forms – of which, tattooing is just one amongst many.

books_icon Cameron McAuliffe and Kurt Iveson, 2011, Art and Crime (and Other Things Besides … ): Conceptualising Graffiti in the City, Geography Compass, 5 128-143

books_icon Margo Demello, 1993, The Convict Body: Tattooing Among Male American Prisoners, Anthropology Today, 9 10-13

books_icon Michael P. Phelan and Scott A. Hunt, 1998, Prison Gang Members’ Tattoos as Identity Work: The Visual Communication of Moral Careers, Symbolic Interaction 21 277-98

books_icon Shoham, E, 2010, “Signs of Honor” Among Russian Inmates in Israel’s Prisons, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 54 984-1003

GJ book review Symbols of a life of crime: The fading tattoos on Russia’s gangland prisoners that can be read like a criminal underworld CV, Daily Mail Online, 5 December 2012

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Posted by Jen Turner

Doha: A Pragmatic Turn in Global Climate Politics?

December 14, 2012

Martin Mahony

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, Doha, Qatar, 2012

The conclusion of the recent United Nations (UN) climate change negotiations in Doha generated an interesting spread of opinion among commentators. For European Commissioner Connie Hedergaard, writing in The Guardian, the Doha talks were significant for the agreement to extend the Kyoto Protocol to 2020, for the supposed bridge-building that occurred between developed and developing countries, and for agreements on financial transfers between the former and the latter to help poorer countries cope with the burdens of climate change amelioration. For Hedergaard, the Doha outcomes lay an important foundation for a comprehensive agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is hoped to be achieved at the 2015 talks.

For Sunita Narain, a prominent Indian environmentalist and director of New Delhi’s Centre for Science and Environment, the Doha talks were another illustration of the intransigence of the major industrialized economies to accept equity as a guiding principle behind an ambitious programme of emissions reductions. Narain writes that the Doha package “is full of words, but no action. The second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol has been agreed upon, but with weak targets and loopholes. The US has not agreed to any meaningful emission reduction. The financial package is a broken promise.”

These are just two examples, but they distill a great diversity of opinions on the outcome of these climate talks, as well as on the future prospects of international climate politics in general. Geographers such as Ian Bailey, Mike Hulme and Harriet Bulkeley have done important work in exploring the spatial politics of climate change. As illustrated above, climate change is an issue which means different things to different people in different places, and which therefore poses challenges to any political process which seeks to integrate diverse and at times contradictory norms, values and expectations into a single, all-encompassing policy agreement.

As Bailey, Hulme, Bulkeley and others have shown, the UN process is not the be-all and end-all of climate change policy. Actions to address climate-related problems are occurring at a variety of spatial scales and through a great diversity of political and social networks, many of which are entirely independent of the annual diplomatic whirlpool of the international climate talks. The increasing acceptance of this multi-scalar approach to dealing with anthropogenic climate change reflects the pragmatic principles of the Hartwell Paper, and similar themes were voiced by a group of leading UK climate legislators following the Doha conference. A pragmatic approach to climate policy also recognizes the importance of ‘win-win’ strategies of emissions reduction, and the formation of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition in Doha, with its commitment to tackling emissions of short-lived atmospheric pollutants such as methane and ‘black carbon’ (or soot), perhaps represents a step in this direction. Cutting emissions of black carbon in particular would have important benefits for human health and wellbeing  - for instance through providing cleaner cooking fuels to impoverished families – and could be achieved through policies which are sensitive to human needs across scales; from the global climate to the individual household.

The rise of a more pragmatic tone in some climate policy discussions is in part a response to the complex geographies of climate politics. Geographers can continue to provide important insight into the ways in which  the idea of climate change interacts with the spatial politics of resource use, human well-being and environmental change, and this line of work may have important impacts on how societies approach the challenge of a changing climate as the outcomes of the Doha talks continue to be digested.
globe42 Connie Hedergaard: Why the Doha climate conference was a success, The Guardian

globe42 COP18, Doha: An assessment. A gateway that leads nowhere, Centre for Science and Environment

books_icon Ian Bailey and Hugh Compston, 2010, Geography and the Politics of Climate Policy, Geography Compass 4 1097-1114

books_icon Mike Hulme, 2008, Geographical Work at the Boundaries of Climate Change, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33 5-11

books_icon Harriet Bulkeley and Vanesa Castán Broto, 2012, Government by Experiment? Global Cities and the Governing of Climate Change, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, DOI: 0.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00535.x

globe42 Doha showed that only domestic policy can drive international co-operation, The Guardian

Rare note of harmony at Doha as action agreed on black carbon, Business Greenglobe42

1 Comment | Environment and Society, Geography Compass, Global Issues, Political Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by mwfmahony

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