ABSTRACT. Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is primarily a market-based mechanism for achieving the effective reduction of carbon emissions from forests. Increasingly, however, concerns are being raised about the implications of REDD+ for equity, including the importance of equity for achieving effective carbon emission reductions from forests. Equity is a multifaceted concept that is understood differently by different actors and at different scales, and public discourse helps determine which equity concerns reach the national policy agenda. Results from a comparative media analysis of REDD+ public discourse in four countries show that policy makers focus more on international than national equity concerns, and that they neglect both the need for increased participation in decision making and recognition of local and indigenous rights. To move from addressing the symptoms to addressing the causes of inequality in REDD+, policy actors need to address issues related to contextual equity, that is, the social and political root causes of inequality.
This article studies the development of Warsaw's Służewiec neighbourhood, Poland's largest business district, as a case of real estate financialization. We argue that the neighbourhood's chaotic 'de-contextualized' growth was shaped by Poland's semi-peripheral position in the global economy on the one hand--enabling a process of subordinate financialization--and legacies of state socialism on the other. In so doing, we mobilize research on peripheral financialization and global economic hierarchies, and studies of post-socialism to enhance debates about real estate financialization. Commercial real estate--and office development in particular--is a crucial domain in which contemporary core-periphery structures are produced and negotiated. A key function of subordinate financialization is to absorb globally mobile capital--the product of financialization in the core. The case of Służewiec shows that only by considering the interplay of global hierarchies (Poland's position as capital absorbent), local dynamics ( fragmented urban development, which was characterized by competition among these unequal municipalities, with local growth coalitions in some municipalities, but not in others) and specific historical legacies (Warsaw's socialist-time functional organization and its transformation, which weakened the city) can we fully understand the specific dynamics that shape real estate financialization in different places.
This article examines the urban development of Moscow from 1992 to 2015, arguing that the city's recent transformation from grey asphalt jungle to a "city comfortable for life" is driven by a process of neoliberal restructuring. In particular, the study finds that a set of multi-scalar dynamics-namely, the global financial crisis, the rise of a local protest movement, and an intensified rivalry between federal and Muscovite elites-were the key driving forces behind Moscow's current evolution. The work advances a conceptual framework of neoliberal urbanisation that enhances the literature on post-socialist cities and, more generally, the broader debate on actually existing neoliberalism.
The article problematizes the role of real estate in geopolitical circulations. The internationalization of real estate increases mutual dependencies and vulnerabilities between nation states and therefore calls for a better appreciation of the geopolitical externalities and exteriorities of real estate. The article brings together disjoint bodies of literature on real estate globalization, assemblage theory, and international relations to show how real estate is a case of the geopolitics of the multiplegeopolitics that is being assembled by diverse and distributed actors, discourses, and materialities representing the contingent and emergent formation of connections and considerations, which affect the ways how foreign relations are negotiated today. The argument is substantiated by considering several dimensions of the real estate/geopolitics nexus: (i) external influences over domestic real estate markets; (ii) the implications of outward real estate investment; (iii) state-led mega-projects conveying externally the power of the state. These dimensions are considered empirically in the context of the renewed geopolitical tensions between a resurgent Russia and the West. Overall, the article calls for a better positioning of real estate in the conceptualizations of soft power, state power, and geopolitics.
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