Socio‐economic stratification of English in globalized landscapes: A market‐oriented perspective

Globalization has dramatically altered the urban societies of Amsterdam and Brussels over recent decades, with intensified socio‐economic inequality, unprecedented levels of multilingualism and the increasing importance of English. In this paper, I examine the use of English in the linguistic landscape of socio‐economically stratified commercial shopping streets in these two second‐tier global cities. I adopt a market‐oriented, contextualized approach to quantitative and qualitative variability in how English emerges in these particular commercial ‘linguistic markets’. McDonaldization in midscale shopping streets occurs alongside downscale and upscale uses of English which are more susceptible to local commercial dynamics, in particular in Brussels. As such, global English in these single city contexts emerges as a heterogeneous and scaled phenomenon shaped by specific local commercial and linguistic market conditions.     

IRENA as a glocal actor: pathways towards energy governmentality

For decades renewable energy has remained a “blind spot” within the sphere of international energy governance. The existing institutional network is highly fragmented, resulting in a myriad of international organizations, which all claim to deal with energy issues, yet do not focus on renewables on a global scale. Since 2009, IRENA, the International Renewable Energy Agency, seeks to fill up this vacuum, thereby creating a new (and maybe more Southern-led) political arena for governing renewable energy issues. This article focuses on IRENA’s role as a changemaker in the sphere of global energy governance by investigating IRENA’s governance practices and contributions to knowledge production.     

Children and global social policy: Exploring the impact of international governmental organisations

Axford N. Children and global social policy: exploring the impact of international governmental organisations International governmental organisations (IGOs) seek to influence child welfare policy and practice in individual sovereign states. But do they succeed and, if so, in what way? This article outlines the nature of selected IGOs' work, explores the nature of their impact and seeks to explain the pattern that emerges. It also notes areas for further research.     

Global Governance and State Governance: Two Strategic Considerations in Contemporary China

Governance is a kind of holistic governance and the notion of governing holistically should be established. The holisticity of governance is reflected in the unity and coordination between value rationality and instrumental rationality, normative appeal and practical appeal as well as global governance and state governance. Global and state governances are two strategic considerations in contemporary China. Actively participating in global governance and rationally promoting state governance is the rational choice of contemporary China, which plays a unique and significant role in realizing the social transformation and national rejuvenation and modernization of contemporary China. Deepening state governance with the help of global governance and promoting global governance with the support of state governance is the basic idea and dimension of understanding and grasping the interaction, coordination and overall planning between the two. The restrictions and effects of global governance on state governance are mainly reflected in such considerations as objects, mechanisms, concepts and interests of governance, and modernization of state governance system and improvement of governance capacity can promote and deepen global governance in a more effective way.     

Deep Uncertainties in Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surge Projections: Implications for Coastal Flood Risk Management

Sea levels are rising in many areas around the world, posing risks to coastal communities and infrastructures. Strategies for managing these flood risks present decision challenges that require a combination of geophysical, economic, and infrastructure models. Previous studies have broken important new ground on the considerable tensions between the costs of upgrading infrastructure and the damages that could result from extreme flood events. However, many risk-based adaptation strategies remain silent on certain potentially important uncertainties, as well as the tradeoffs between competing objectives. Here, we implement and improve on a classic decision-analytical model (Van Dantzig 1956) to: (i) capture tradeoffs across conflicting stakeholder objectives, (ii) demonstrate the consequences of structural uncertainties in the sea-level rise and storm surge models, and (iii) identify the parametric uncertainties that most strongly influence each objective using global sensitivity analysis. We find that the flood adaptation model produces potentially myopic solutions when formulated using traditional mean-centric decision theory. Moving from a single-objective problem formulation to one with multiobjective tradeoffs dramatically expands the decision space, and highlights the need for compromise solutions to address stakeholder preferences. We find deep structural uncertainties that have large effects on the model outcome, with the storm surge parameters accounting for the greatest impacts. Global sensitivity analysis effectively identifies important parameter interactions that local methods overlook, and that could have critical implications for flood adaptation strategies.     

Climate justice and sustained transnational mobilization

ABSTRACT

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. Here I review evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements germane for understanding the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change have created an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization for confronting neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models for building an enduring international organization that will represent subaltern groups and have a substantial impact on world politics.     

Is there a global super-bourgeoisie?

In recent decades, accelerating processes of globalization and an increase in economic inequality in most of the world's countries have raised the question of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie integrated at the global level, sometimes described as a global super-bourgeoisie. This group would be distinguished by its unequaled level of wealth and global interconnectedness, its transnational ubiquity and concentration in the planet's major global cities, its specific culture, consumption habits, sites of sociability and shared references, and even by class consciousness and capacity to act collectively. This article successively discusses how the social sciences have examined these various dimensions of the question and begun to provide systematic empirical answers.     

Symmetrical design for symmetrical global sensitivity analysis of model output

Symmetrical global sensitivity analysis (SGSA) can help practitioners focusing on the symmetrical terms of inputs whose uncertainties have an impact on the model output, which allows reducing the complexity of the model. However, there remains the challenging problem of finding an efficient method to get symmetrical global sensitivity indices (SGSI) when the functional form of the symmetrical terms is unknown, including numerical and non-parametric situations. In this study, we propose a novel sampling plan, called symmetrical design, for SGSA. As a preliminary experiment for model feature extracting, such plan offers the virtue of run-size economy due to its closure respective to the given group. Using the design, we give estimation methods of SGSI as well as their asymptotic properties respectively for numerical model and non-parametrical model directly by the model outputs, and further propose a significance test for SGSI in non-parametric situation. A case study for a benchmark of GSA and a real data analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed design.     

原产地多元化视角下的地方产业集群升级研究

地方产业集群升级是区域经济发展的重要研究主题,由于中国特别是东部地区产业集群具有"天生全球化"特质,基于价值链的集群升级理论在适用性上存在局限。本文以原产地多元化为切入点,依据产业集群嵌入全球价值链的程度,对其通过原产地多元化实现升级的途径进行探讨,并结合案例分析加以验证。进而提出基于原产地多元化实现地方产业集群升级的主要内容和政策建议,以期为现实的产业集群发展和区域经济政策制定提供启示。     

与国际行政法的产生有关的几个基本问题——基于全球化、全球治理的视角

全球治理的提出源于全球化的推动,而全球治理的提出及实践则使国际行政法的产生、形成成为可能。具体而言,全球公民社会的兴起与国际非政府组织的发展是国际行政法产生的两个现实驱动因素。国际行政法的产生路径可总结为"自下而上"和"自上而下"的路径。国际行政法具有区别于国内行政法的若干明显特征,国际层面相比国内层面的很多特殊性也使得国际行政法的体系化发展面临诸多挑战。这些问题虽然不能忽视,但它们也并非不可克服。虽然国际行政法不如国内行政法成熟,但是如能改进合法性,便能够将超国家机构的全球治理职能发挥得更好。全球治理语境下国际行政法体系的产生、形成是一种历史的必然趋势。