This paper is an analysis of the policy innovations of the European Union's Water Framework Directive and their relationship to a range of economic and geographical interests. It follows a previous paper describing the process of the making of the WFD in relation to the new EU co-decision process. This paper argues that the innovative aspects of the policy reflect a context in which the broader governance arrangements for water management in Europe are shifting in dramatic ways. The paper identifies the aspects of the WFD that are innovative by comparing it with previous European directives related to water management legislation. The paper then describes the state of Europe's freshwater resources as a basis for understanding the regional geography of interests in the policy-making process and examines the contrasting interests of state, market and civil society institutions and their impact on the final draft. The paper ends by bringing the history of the WFD up to date by looking at the initial responses of the key actors to the final WFD and at recent developments in relation to implementation.
With the transnational turn in the social sciences attention has now turnedto 'global civil society', 'transnational civil society', 'transnational networks' and, most recently, 'migrant' or 'diasporic civil society'. Claims
Attempts by policy-makers to encourage diasporas to engage in development in the Global South rely on conceptions of behaviour drawn from economics that emphasize individual choice, stimuli and motivations. This article argues that diasporas are better understood as 'communities of practice' in which actions are conceptualized as part of a wider social system based on embodied knowledge acquired through socialization, technology and the habituation of particular lifestyles. Using social theories of practice to analyze remittances draws attention to the symptomatic silences of dominant theorizations of behaviour. Existing theorizations underpin, and thereby uncritically endorse, potentially unsustainable development policies based on remittances. The alternative approach presented here opens up new areas for policy and research based on medium to long-term changes in the socio-technical remittance regime.
Across the globe there is an ongoing debate about whether water ought to be treated as a commodity. This paper argues that recent geographical work on commodities can usefully inform these debates amongst environmental and development policymakers. First, the paper uses a case study from Cameroon to show that the commodification of public water supplies is not new, permanent or inevitable. Second, it uses the case study and insights from the psychoanalytic literature to examine the relationship between the willingness‐to‐pay for water and knowledge amongst water users about the costs of production. It is argued that the commodity fetish remains a useful concept, but that it requires reinterpretation. It concludes that demystifying the commodity includes not only unveiling the politics of production but also understanding the politics of the practice of exchange by considering the socio‐synthetic effects of treating things as commodities.
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