The authors draw on the concept of a 'sustainability fix'-a political discourse which allows development to proceed by accommodating both profit-making and environmental concerns-to analyze how municipalities muster support for development in the face of worries about negative environmental impacts. The case of Whistler, British Columbia, a tourist resort with an official orientation toward sustainable development, is used to illustrate the politics of balancing economic and environmental commitments. The authors deepen the sustainability fix concept by addressing: first, how such a fix is achieved through the assemblage of local and extralocal resources-specifically, 'imported' policy models which direct attention to certain definitions of problems and legitimate specific types of policy solutions; and second, how the politics of municipal policy-making is about more than contention and how it involves the sort of ongoing and broadly defined learning that has been largely undertheorized in the local politics literature. A key point is that local politics and policy making are always also extralocal in various ways. They involve a local politics of policy mobility. The authors expand on this premise to show how Whistler's model of sustainability planning has recently been circulated to other municipalities with similar social, economic^ and environmental conditions.
This article reviews geographic literature on policy mobilities. It outlines the emergence of the policy mobilities, mutations, and assemblage approach, and the geographic, sociological, and political science literatures from which it draws its origins. Focusing attention on the interplay between the structuring fields of the policy transfer and the policy actors who are ultimately responsible for the construction, conceptualization, adoption, education around, and implementation of policies, this article charts work that has focused on the mechanisms through which policies are mobilized, altered, and touched down in various places and how these processes shape cities. It concludes with commentary on possible future directions, both empirical and conceptual, that the policy mobilities approach might take and note the various methodological contributions that are emerging from it.
Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gained traction in geographic literatures. Drawing on our global comparative research of low‐carbon mobility transitions, we argue that critical mobilities scholars can rethink and expand the understanding of mobility through engagement with commons–enclosure thinking. We present a new concept, “commoning mobility,” a theorisation that both envisions and shapes practices that develop fairer and greener mobilities and more inclusive, collaboratively governed societies. Our analysis introduces three “logics” of mobility transition projects. First, the paper discusses how a logic of scarcity has been a driver for mobility planning as the scarcity of oil, finance, space, and time are invoked across the world as stimuli for aspiring to greener, “smarter,” and cheaper mobilities. The paper then identifies two responses to the logic of scarcity: the logics of austerity and the logics of commoning. Austere mobilities are examined to problematise the distribution of responsibility for emissions and ensuing injustices and exclusion in low‐carbon transitions. The logics of commoning shows a potential to reassess mobility not only as an individual freedom but also as a collective good, paving the way for fairer mobility transitions and a collaborative tackling of sustainable mobility challenges.
An increasing number of scholars are focusing attention on the circulation of urban policies and the concept of ‘policy mobilities’. This collection of short commentaries identifies emerging areas of interest and contention for urban policy mobilities researchers. Exploring issues from conceptual dualisms and topological thinking to interdisciplinarity and slow methodologies, the commentaries offer refinements and suggest new pathways for urban policy mobilities research in the future.
This paper explores the connections between activism for drug policy reform and the post‐political conditioning of urban politics. The emergent literature on policy mobilities is brought into conversation with post‐political analyses on the constitution of the properly political, arguing that there has been much focus on moments of rupture in the seemingly post‐political condition while ignoring ongoing political resistances, what I call ‘everyday proper politics’. Resultant analyses of urban politics are therefore often incomplete. This paper moves to address the gap between rupture and resistance through a global examination of harm reduction; a policy, practice and philosophy that embodies contemporary (post‐) political contradictions. It is an evidence‐based public health policy often enacted through medicalised practices across state, public and private space, yet its history and philosophy are rooted in radical understandings of participatory democracy. Exploring activism for harm‐reduction policies and the ways they are made manifest in cities globally begins to unravel the paradox of radical care practice and liberalised notions of self‐care that harm reduction embodies. Harm reduction, as it is mobilised across cities with divergent histories, localities and political contexts, demonstrates that its post‐political framing does not foreclose a radical politics of public health but rather can enable it. This paper demonstrates that public health and post‐politics intersect at the important points of health, wellbeing and urban development. In a post‐political condition, public health agencies assume the role of technical experts under the auspices of advanced neoliberalisation. Yet when questions arise regarding the management of drug use, drug users’ right to health and resources that engage and facilitate these activities, it becomes apparent that there indeed remain properly political battles to fight, battles that attract extra‐local audiences and coalitions from both sides of the debate that to attempt to influence policy outcomes in places far away.
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