This paper presents a critique of current thinking on the causes and impacts of corruption and the measures designed to combat it. It begins by exploring the evolution of the current preoccupation with corruption and traces the growth in international initiatives designed to tackle the issue. It then moves on to consider the assumptions underlying the dominant schools of thought on corruption and alternative definitions of the phenomenon. The limitations of the dominant neoliberal perspective are explored in detail, focusing particularly on its blindness to the complex interplay between economic liberalisation, political power and institutional reform. An alternative framework that locates corruption at the systemic level is proposed. The paper concludes with some thoughts on potential directions for future geographical research on the topic.
Although we do not learn the title of it until the last chapter of the book, the artwork chosen for the cover of Cities and Gender communicates much about the tenor of the content within. The image is from a performance piece called Journey with Restraints, in which the artist walked through the streets of Liverpool struggling under the weight of lead wings. This image speaks to how the authors view the urban, a view that is generally limiting and restrictive. In one of my classes in which I cover issues of planning and gender, I often write two statements on the board at the start of class. The first is "All cities are sexist." The second is "A woman's place is in the city." We then discuss how both statements could be true. There is none of that second hopeful view in this book of the work that cities can do to improve gender relations. While the authors mention some more positive developments throughout the book, like the progressive planning network EuroFEM, these developments are simply listed and never gone into in depth or used as examples that may be replicated elsewhere. Instead, the book is more a litany of all that is wrong with gender relations everywhere, not only in urban areas.The stated goals of the book are "to promote an explicitly gendered urban theory; to expose persistent inequalities in the everyday lived realities of women and men in both the global north and the global south, through the analytic lens of gender; and to influence the tone and substance of classroom debate as well as practitioner and civic engagement" (283). Although it is certainly daunting to cover cities and gender comprehensively in one textbook, the authors further complicate their task by adding development theory to the mix. In short, this book tries to do too much and is rather sprawling as a result.In attempting to cover everything, to make connections between everything all the time, the book and the individual chapters lose focus. Topics could just as easily be in one chapter as another because the topics that are covered in each are so wide ranging. For example, Chapter 6, "Migration, movement and mobility" starts with an explanation of push and pull factors in migration; includes a case study on "Gender, generation, mobility, and care" on household travel patterns to two schools in Newcastle, United Kingdom; and then presents an extended section on driving and car ownership, with more space dedicated to this issue than to the entire history of urbanization in Chapter 2, including a box highlighting "automobility" and a case study on "The hypermobile cosmocrat." Next, it presents a section on residential mobility that questions the very notion of household and family, but does not address the issues of gentrification and displacement, including a case study on families "Living together apart"; a section on "Globalisation, automobility and development," with case studies on "Gendered work in and around Masay, Nicaragua" and on "Young women's experience of harassment on city buses in India"; and then sections on "H...
PurposeThis introductory paper aims to serve a dual purpose. First, it seeks to trace some of the key elements of this emerging agenda in critical corruption studies and the major directions in which the field has moved since 2006, exploring some of the connections between dominant discourses of corruption and anti‐corruption and the upheavals which have occurred in the global economy during this period along the way. Second, this discussion also aims to serve as a contextual introduction to this special issue by embracing some of the common themes elaborated in the other papers collected here.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a brief personal reflection on developments in the field of critical corruption studies.FindingsThe paper reveals some of the limitations of the mainstream approach towards corruption.Originality/valueThe paper summarises recent developments in the field and provides a context‐setting narrative within which the other papers that comprise this special issue can be situated.
This article examines recent institutional thinking on the green economy and the implications of official understandings and structuration of a green economy for the global South. Assertions about the transformative potential of a green economy by many international actors conceals a complexity of problems, including the degree to which the green economy is still based on old fossil economies and technical fixes, and the processes through which the green economy ideation remains subject to Northern economic and technical dominance. The article places the intellectual roots of the green economy within a broader historical context and suggests some ways the strategic economic and ideological interests of the global North remain key drivers of green‐economy thinking. The analysis is substantiated through two illustrative Latin American examples: the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor and green economy initiatives in Brazil. These suggest that, if the green economy is to address global challenges effectively, it must be conceptualized as more than a bolt‐on to existing globalizing capitalism and encompass more critical understandings of the complex socio‐economic processes through which poverty is produced and reproduced and through which the global environment is being transformed, a critique which also applies to mainstream discourses of sustainable development.
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