Balancing global city with global village

The discourse on habitat and human settlements is increasingly dominated by that of the global, mega-city. If the aim of those of us in the human settlements field are to improve our understanding of and action on habitat and human settlements, this, often exclusive, focus is a mistake. Our habitat is better understood and acted upon as a network of interwoven settlements and surrounding countryside, large and small, themselves interwoven within our larger ecosystem. In this network the habitat of our smaller settlements (smaller cities, towns, villages) and rural areas and our global village also plays a critical role. The assumption can be challenged that urbanization and the mega-city are the critical issues of habitat and human settlements. Evidence suggests that with some rurbanization there is also counter urbanization, the ruralization of cities, and, perhaps most important, a growing urbanization as city-country interactions intensify. Habitat for all and habitat for a healthy, sustainable planet demands our openness to these new concepts and realities. It demands an integrated, balanced, approach which helps a wide range of living settlement nodes, large and small, to nurture each other. Global City and Global Village must go hand in hand. Our planetary and human health depends on it.     

Traceability in global governance

An increasingly important challenge in global governance, which in some issue areas has been labelled ‘traceability’, has been to track the cross‐border travels of objects that are associated with positive or negative effects. However, the common properties and identifiable patterns of variation of traceability across issue areas or industries have been insufficiently explored. We identify key properties of traceability systems, including the variation and interactions between the physical properties of the traced object, the positive or negative effects with which it is associated, the monitoring technology, and the institutionalized power relations that activate and constrain traceability systems. We examine and compare traceability systems for food safety, conflict minerals, pharmaceuticals, carbon emissions, money laundering and financial transactions. Understanding traceability in this way is important not only for these cases, but also for understanding interactions between objects, infrastructures, as well as monitoring and political mechanisms in global governance more generally.     

A global disability indicator

Disability is difficulty performing roles and activities due to health problems. It is largely experienced by older persons as they accumulate progressive chronic conditions. To measure functional status of individuals and populations, contemporary surveys include sets of detailed items about disability. Little effort has gone into developing global indicators of disability that cover the concept briefly but well. A global disability indicator is a compact and inexpensive device for public health surveillance and scientific study of disablement. I present and critique items that have been used in North American surveys. Good candidates are selected for methodological study. Both laboratory-based cognitive studies and large-scale statistical studies are recommended; the first will reveal meanings of items and responses and the second, items' systematic structure and prediction ability. The ultimate goal is to identify one or a few fine indicators for widespread inclusion in population health surveys.     

A global civil economy

Every nation in the world has found it necessary to regulate markets to protect consumers, workers, and the public, but there are no plans to regulate business in the global market. There is no world government with agencies which can monitor and control corporate misconduct at the world level. The concept of a civil society, however, supplies ideas which have guided political philosophy for centuries, and today it is shaping public policy and socioeconomic research. This article (a) conceptualizes the problem of global markets in a civil society, (b) examines global business linked to civil market solutions, and (c) stresses the organization of world conferences to advance socioeconomic research on civil markets.     

A global sense of religious place: the production of religious and spiritual sites through local–global entanglements and global mobilities

Places of worship in the Christian tradition are often considered to retain fixed and static identities. However, circuits of globalization and global mobilities are increasingly present within such sites and drawn upon to construct new forms of place and geographies filtered through the individual church’s channels of mobilities. Following on from the new mobilities paradigm and relational approaches to ‘place’, this paper explores how the global and the local become implicated in places of worship. Using participant-observation and diary-interview methods based in Baptist churches in Bristol, UK, and framing the findings through Urry’s framework (Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity, 2007), the research examines the multiple interdependent mobilities of imaginary travel, communication, virtual travel, and corporeal travel. Whilst global mobilities were present within the sites, locality and local mobilities also featured prominently. The combination of interdependent mobilities, produced unique place identities in each of church that engaged with the global yet retained local circuits and community identity.     

Preparing social workers for global gaze: locating global citizenship within social work curricula

Institutions of higher education have been particularly vulnerable to the pressures of globalization, resulting in policies and ensuing curricula that look to address the needs of students to be better prepared for living and working in a world in which global awareness, and perhaps even global identity, are requisites for success. Social work education is uniquely positioned to adapt its curricula for successful student outcomes in an increasingly globalized world. The challenges associated with social welfare, which have intensified under globalization, has been a long-standing concern of social work policy and practice. This article suggests strategies for integrating global citizenship education within social work studies, recognizing the affinities that exist between contemporary conceptualizations of global citizenship and social work practice. The article proposes four interrelated components that might be strategically implemented within existing social work curriculum, in consideration of the contextual ethos of the respective school of social work.     

Responses to global challenges: trends in aid‐financed global public goods

Based on four decades (1973–2013) of OECD‐Development Assistance Committee aid to developing countries, this article aims to show aid‐financed global public goods trends, their changing composition and their main drivers. In particular, a constant increase in the share of aid‐financed global public goods and a shift towards weighted‐sum and weakest‐link global goods are observed. Economic conditions, imitation effects, global engagement and domestic spending result as the main drivers of donors’ demand for aid‐financed global public goods. Besides, a certain complementarity in the provision of global goods plays a role, especially in European countries and Japan, partially easing the prognosis for the collective action problems related to global goods     

Toward better global poverty measures

While much progress has been made over the last 25 years in measuring global poverty, there are a number of challenges ahead. The paper discusses three sets of problems: (i) how to allow for social effects on welfare, recognizing the identification issues involved; (ii) the need to monitor progress in raising the consumption floor above its biological level, in addition to counting the number of people living near the floor; and (iii) addressing the longstanding concerns about prevailing approaches to making inter-country comparisons of price levels facing poor people. Some suggestions are offered for operational solutions, building on past research.     

The possibilities for global inequality and poverty reduction using revenues from global carbon pricing

Global carbon pricing can yield revenues which are large enough to create significant global pro-poor redistributive opportunities. We analyze alternative multidecade growth trajectories from 2015 to 2105 for major global economies with carbon tax rates designed to stabilize emissions in the presence of both continued country growth and autonomous energy use efficiency improvement. In our central case analysis, revenues from globally internalizing carbon pricing rise to 8 % and then fall to 6 % of gross world product. High growth in India and China reduces global inequality and poverty strongly over time, but important incremental redistributive effects can be achieved using global carbon pricing revenues. Taking into account both between-country effects and previous literature estimates of within-country effects, a global carbon tax alone tends to be regressive in its global incidence. However, if its revenues are redistributed globally via equal per capita transfers, in our central case the Gini coefficient for world income falls by about 3 % and the share of the bottom decile rises by 81 % on average from 2015 to 2105. The population living in poverty falls by 16 % in 2015. Going further, global poverty could be eliminated entirely by 2015 according to our calculations if one third of global carbon tax revenues were redistributed directly to the poorest individuals.     

The global subject of precarity

ABSTRACT

This article explores the universalizing logic of precarity and precariousness in global studies discourse. Originally articulated in the work of Guy Standing and Judith Butler, this logic presupposes a possibility for a global politics of equality between precarious subjects in the North and South based on an emergent shared horizon of suffering. In a close reading of Standing and Butler, I challenge claims about equivalence by calling attention to the liberal analytics that inform their work. Drawing on a postcolonial attunement to historically constituted exclusions, I argue that precarity is better understood as a dis-ordering experience of sovereign subjectivity whose principal referent is the liberal not global subject of precarity. Globalizing the liberal subject of precarity entails the recuperation of its constitutive outside, namely the Third World, as the original site of abjection. The de-politicizing implications of attempts to universalize the subject of precarity are briefly outlined in conclusion.     

Abolition democracy and global justice

Abstract

As new social relations produce new kinds of social subjects, scholars in American Studies and Area Studies experience anxieties about disciplinary as well as geographic borders. The Civil Rights tradition of the 14th Amendment plays an important role within progressive American Studies scholarship, but in the course of seeking equality and exclusion within the USA, this tradition runs the risk of occluding the role of the nation in the world and its central role in creating and preserving inequality and injustice in other nations. An emerging emphasis on struggles for social justice without seeking state power encapsulates many of the most progressive impulses within Area Studies and transnational studies, yet this perspective runs the risk of occluding the enduring importance of the nation-state in inflecting global developments with local histories and concerns. The present moment challenges us to draw on both traditions, and to use each to critique the shortcomings of the other, while at the same time promoting an inclusionary, nonsectarian, and mutually supportive dialogue about our differences.