The last decade has seen a proliferation of theoretical approaches, which have sought to uncover the changing form and governance of cities and regions following the dissolution of the Fordist ‘sociospatial fix’. This article provides a critical review of some of the more influential of these debates that have sought to analyse: the central–local relations of government; the growing influence of ‘regimes’ and ‘growth coalitions’ in energizing urban economies; and the rise of the ‘learning’ or ‘institutionally thick’ region. The authors argue that, although providing valuable insights, these theories suffer from: 1) a failure to integrate analytically into their inquiries a relational account of the state, and thereby to neglect the state's influence in actively shaping the urban and regional fabric; and 2) a similar failure to problematize the issue of scale, often taking for granted the spatial context of their own particular inquiry. Thus, terms like urban regimes, urban coalitions and learning regions are deployed as if they were ontological and epistemological givens. Drawing on neo-Gramscian state theory and recent work on the ‘politics of scale’, this article seeks to open up urban and regional research towards a multiscaled analysis, and to consider political economic activity as a series of situated, context-specific and politically constructed processes. These arguments are then briefly deployed to demonstrate the multifarious and multiscalar changes that characterize London's governance in the late 1990s.

Background Enset (Ensete ventricosum, Musaceae) is an African crop that currently provides the staple food for approx. 20 million Ethiopians. Whilst wild enset grows over much of East and Southern Africa and the genus extends across Asia to China, it has only ever been domesticated in the Ethiopian Highlands. Here, smallholder farmers cultivate hundreds of landraces across diverse climatic and agroecological systems.• Scope Enset has several important food security traits. It grows over a relatively wide range of conditions, is somewhat drought-tolerant, and can be harvested at any time of the year, over several years. It provides an important dietary starch source, as well as fibres, medicines, animal fodder, roofing and packaging. It stabilizes soils and microclimates and has significant cultural importance. In contrast to the other cultivated species in the family Musaceae (banana), enset has received relatively little research attention. Here, we review and critically evaluate existing research, outline available genomic and germplasm resources, aspects of pathology, and explore avenues for crop development.• Conclusion Enset is an underexploited starch crop with significant potential in Ethiopia and beyond. Research is lacking in several key areas: empirical studies on the efficacy of current agronomic practices, the genetic diversity of landraces, approaches to systematic breeding, characterization of existing and emerging diseases, adaptability to new ranges and land-use change, the projected impact of climate change, conservation of crop wild relatives, by-products or co-products or non-starch uses, and the enset microbiome. We also highlight the limited availability of enset germplasm in living collections and seedbanks, and the lack of knowledge of reproductive and germination biology needed to underpin future breeding. By reviewing the current state of the art in enset research and identifying gaps and opportunities, we hope to catalyse the development and sustainable exploitation of this neglected starch crop.

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of the politics of food banking in the UK. Existing work has raised concerns about the institutionalisation of food banks, with charitable assistance apparently -even if inadvertentlyundermining collectivist welfare and deflecting attention from fundamental injustices in the food system. This paper presents original ethnographic work that examines the neglected politics articulated within food banks themselves.Conceptualising food banks as potential spaces of encounter where predominantly middle class volunteers come into contact with poor others Lawson and Elwood , weillustrate the ways food banks may both reinforce but also rework and generate new, ethical and political attitudes, beliefs and identities. We also draw attention to the limits of these progressive possibilities, and examine the ways in which some food banks continue to operate within a set of highly restrictive, and stigmatising, welfare technologies. By highlighting the contradictory dynamics at work in food bank organisations, and among food bank volunteers and clients, we suggest the political role of food banks warrants neither uncritical celebration nor outright dismissal. Rather, food banks represent a highly ambiguous political space still in the making and open to contestation.

In the U K the current Coalition government has introduced an unprecedented set o f reforms to welfare, public services, and local governance under the rubric o f 'localism'. Conventional analytics o f neoliberalism have commonly portrayed the impacts o f these changes in the architectures o f governance in blanket terms: as an utterly regressive dilution o f local democracy; as an extension of conservative political technology by which state welfare is denuded in favour of market-led individualism; and as a further politicised subjectification o f the charitable self. Such seemingly hegemonic grammars o f critique can ignore or underestimate the progressive possibilities for creating new ethical and political spaces in amongst the neoliberal canvas. In this paper we investigate the localism agenda using alternative interpretative grammars that are more open to the recognition o f interstitial politics o f resistance and experimentation that are springing up within, across, and beyond formations o f the neoliberal. We analyse the broad framework o f intentional localisms laid down by the Coalition government, and then point to four significant pathways by which more progressive articulations o f localism have been emerging in amongst the neoliberal infrastructure. In so doing we seek to endorse and expand imaginations o f political activism that accentuate an interstitial political sensibility that works strategically, and even subversively, with the tools at hand.