Geoforum最新文献

{"title":"The dynamics within urban infrastructure: Tokyo’s water supply from the 1870s to the present","authors":"Aobo Ran","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104370","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104370","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The dynamic between political regimes and infrastructure development remains central to debates, especially regarding the tension between modernization and tradition. Over the past century, Tokyo’s water supply has changed dramatically, transitioning from the feudal Tokugawa shogunate through constitutional monarchy and wartime militarism to post‐war democratization. This paper examines how regimes in each of these periods impact on Tokyo’s water supply system, and reveals the complex interplay between the political landscape, technological modernization, and water as material infrastructure. This paper argues that Tokyo’s water supply system evolves neither along a linear path of centralization nor decentralization but instead demonstrates dynamic politics across different periods. Tokyo’s water supply embodying multi-temporalities of the modern and traditional produces evolving hydrosocial territories. The findings challenge conventional narratives of a strong correlation between political regimes and the trajectory of urban infrastructure. By exploring the dynamics within Tokyo’s water supply system, this paper contributes to the growing literature on infrastructure as a site of political interactions and offers new insights into temporalities and territoriality along with urban infrastructure transition.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104370"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703453","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"‘Beyond inviting to the table’: Engaging the farming community in food system governance in the US and the UK","authors":"Haley Parzonko ,&nbsp;Roberta Sonnino ,&nbsp;Lada Timotijevic","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104367","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104367","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent debates on transforming the food system toward more sustainable outcomes are increasingly emphasizing the need for participatory and inclusive governance models. In this context, mechanisms such as Food Policy Groups (FPGs), which are designed to enhance the participation of different food system actors, are generally considered critical levers to achieve democratic objectives in food systems. While their transformative capacity and participatory potential have been widely emphasized, the specific mechanisms and strategies that can enable or limit their inclusive potential have remained under-explored. To fill this gap, this article examines the dynamics of inclusion that shape stakeholder participation in FPGs through an in-depth examination of one key stakeholder group: the farming community. Data collected on 25 FPGs from the US and the UK are analyzed through a focus on the interplay between three critical dimensions of stakeholder participation: (i) the “who”, (ii) the “how” and (iii) the “context” (i.e., enablers and barriers to participation). This analysis shows that a range of context-specific dynamics shape participant composition and engagement approaches, while also creating varying opportunities and constraints that influence stakeholder participation. We conclude that for stakeholder engagement strategies to be meaningfully inclusive and sustainable over time, they need to entail dynamic, adaptive and place-based approaches that respond to the needs and circumstances of different stakeholders.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104367"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Climate change adaptation as social navigation: Insights from Kenya’s drylands","authors":"Paul Stacey ,&nbsp;Mikkel Funder ,&nbsp;Rahma Hassan ,&nbsp;Iben Nathan ,&nbsp;Sylvia Rotich ,&nbsp;Jackson Wachira","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104366","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104366","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Many studies explore climate change adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on how climatic and ecological variations, in combination with available resources, shape actors’ options for adaptation, with growing recognition of the significance of political, social, and economic factors. This article argues that the concept of ‘social navigation’ adds to our understanding of the everyday, enabling work of adaptation. Looking at three cases of pastoralist climate change adaptation in Kenya, the social navigation concept takes pastoralists’ perspectives and foregrounds micro level agency. It contributes to the extensive literature by highlighting adaptation outcomes as shaped by the ability of actors to change and develop social positions based on limited knowledge about changing social, climatic, and ecological conditions. This demands new forms of relations and interactions as well as continual considerations of alternative possibilities and challenges. The lens of social navigation, we find, emphasises climate change adaptation as a tactical praxis emerging from actor’s changing ideas, actions, relations, and positions in an interplay with the changing surroundings to overcome immediate needs and in endeavours to secure longer-term stability. We show that successful adaptation is likely when affected actors can change and develop social positions to align with new opportunities made available from the changing contexts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104366"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144703452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Governing feral cats through platform: The StreetCat project, digital environmental governance, and multispecies urbanism","authors":"Lijia Guo,&nbsp;Yi Yu","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104365","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104365","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Urban feral cats in China have recently emerged as a focal point for complex governance challenges and societal debates. In response, digital technology interventions, exemplified by the StreetCat project, have emerged. Existing scholarship on feral cats, however, inadequately addresses the operational logic of such digital interventions. Employing online/offline ethnography and multi-source web data analysis, this study investigates how digital technology reshapes spatial practices in urban feral cat governance and reconfigures human-place-nonhuman relationships. The research reveals that technology deployment centred on Smart Cat Houses, AI recognition, and data platforms establishes a novel digital governance, transforming feral cats into data subjects amenable to monitoring, quantification, and remote intervention. Such intervention, in turn, enacts a profoundly ambivalent politics of care. While it fosters new forms of digital intimacy and cross-regional care networks, it simultaneously introduces cognitive biases and risks of commodification. Spatially, this politics of care manifests in the deployment of Smart Cat Houses as contested sites of public space, while the meaning of ’beastly places’ is revealed to be co-produced through the entanglement of technological failure, human conflict, and crucial, non-human agency. Integrating animal geography and <em>trans</em>-species urban theory, this paper advances digital governance scholarship by revealing how its application to feral cats in urban China creates a contested entanglement of datafication, material dependency, and politics of care, which co-produces ’beastly places’ while highlighting non-human agency and urban socio-ecological complexities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104365"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144685614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested framings of climate change and health in the Arctic: A narrative analysis of health in Canadian government climate change policy affecting Inuit Nunangat","authors":"Katy Davis ,&nbsp;Claire H. Quinn ,&nbsp;James D. Ford ,&nbsp;Melanie Flynn ,&nbsp;Anuszka Mosurska ,&nbsp;Sherilee L. Harper","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104363","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104363","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Narratives are used to make sense of the world, to understand complex challenges and to imagine change. Inequity and unequal power structures are understood to be the root causes of disasters, but dominant narratives frame climate change as an ‘externalised’ threat and propose technocratic approaches to defending the status quo. This distracts from solutions that address the root causes of disaster. In Inuit Nunangat, social determinants of health include ongoing colonialism and policy, shaping Inuit experiences of climate change. This paper reports the results of a narrative analysis of Canadian governmental climate and health policy documents relevant to Inuit Nunangat between 2015 and 2021. Narratives are deconstructed and common narratives are identified, drawing from Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad. The dominant narrative identified focuses on knowledge, technological innovation and resilience, externalising the threat of climate change and proposing solutions that leverage knowledge and innovation. A second narrative highlights collective responsibility and partnership, identifying inequity as a driver of harm but not engaging with power relations when detailing solutions. A third narrative, present in fewer documents, centres sovereignty and relationships, identifies inequities and colonial policy as drivers of harm in the context of climate change, and proposes solutions that address root causes and further Indigenous sovereignty. How we tell the ‘story’ of climate change determines how we act and adapt. If dominant policy narratives distract from addressing the root causes of harm, inequities and violence will be perpetuated through inappropriate actions and missed opportunities. Narratives identified in this analysis offer other ways of telling this story.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104363"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144679895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Land data for whom? The marketization, privatization and commercialization of land data management in Canada","authors":"Laura Funk ,&nbsp;Sarah Rotz ,&nbsp;Annette Aurélie Desmarais","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104355","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104355","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Land inequality is increasingly recognized as a critical global issue, yet its dynamics and implications remain underexplored in specific contexts. This paper examines Canada’s land registry systems, which are essential for understanding land ownership trends but are largely inaccessible for public-interest research due to marketization, privatization and commercialization. Governed provincially and territorially, these registries operate primarily under the Torrens system; a colonial framework designed to facilitate settler ownership and economic accumulation. This system separates land from its historical and ecological contexts, reinforcing settler private property regimes that prioritize market interests. Through interviews, document analysis, and reflections on the authors’ experiences, our study focuses on Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan to explore the marketization, and specifically the privatization and commercialization, of land data in Canada. It addresses three core questions: How does marketization impact access to and use of land data? Who benefits from these configurations? And how do these structures constrain understanding of land ownership trends, particularly in agriculture? The findings reveal that Canada’s land data management systems favor commercial interests and profit generation, treating data as a commodity while restricting equitable access for researchers and the public. This restriction impedes efforts to understand and address critical issues such as farmland financialization–or the increase in farmland ownership and control by financial actors. By situating these findings within the broader literature on colonialism and neoliberalism, this paper outlines how and why land data management systems have proceeded as they have. Further, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of how the current structure and function of land registry systems perpetuate land inequities, and obstruct progress toward social and economic equity, Indigenous sovereignty, and public awareness of land tenure dynamics.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104355"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144654686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Solid waste management in Dhaka: Understanding the evolution of a waste regime","authors":"Shahana Akther,&nbsp;James Evans,&nbsp;Nate Millington","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104364","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104364","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Municipal solid waste management is often viewed as a pressing environmental issue facing the global South, but waste can be turned into a valuable resource if properly managed. Waste mismanagement negatively impacts urban environmental sustainability. Waste governance in the global South has received significant attention due to complex social dynamics, interdependences, and webs of stakeholders involved. Detailed investigations are needed in southern cities to understand waste governance dynamics, how different socio-economic drivers influence governance shifts in waste governance, and what challenges cities face during these shifts. This paper investigates how municipal solid waste governance regimes have evolved in Dhaka over the last fifty years after independence in 1971 in terms of practices, strategies, and actors’ involvement. Using the waste regime concept, we analyse how MSW rules and regulations change over time, and how these changes impact waste infrastructure, actor participation, and waste flow dynamics. In July and September 2022, 50 semi-structured interviews were conducted with six stakeholder groups directly involved in municipal solid waste management in Dhaka, along with 18 focus groups and 3 field observations. Qualitative data analysis revealed three key waste regime periods developed between 1972 and 2022. There was a significant change in waste management practices and governance approaches during these periods. Ultimately, the waste governance regime increased waste collection efficiency and infrastructure development but failed to promote resource recovery. Dhaka’s solid waste governance requires an integrated formal and informal governance strategy that engages local stakeholders in appropriate resource recovery options. The paper provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the socio-political dynamics of waste governance regimes and how global South megacities manage waste and move towards environmental sustainability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104364"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144633899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Secrecy & spectacle, or how a tale of seabed exploitation shaped the U.S.’s relationship to the law of the sea","authors":"Aria Ritz Finkelstein","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104354","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104354","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How do representations of extractive frontiers shape political geographies? This study examines one episode, that of the USNS <em>Hughes Glomar Explorer</em>, and finds that, while it has often been told as a piece of military history or a Cold War espionage adventure, its role in U.S. domestic law, U.S. engagement with international law, and the effect of the complex interaction between the two on global legal order has been overlooked. An examination of the legal documents, popular press, and conference proceedings that are the episode’s artifacts makes evident that its simultaneous publicity and concealment contributed to the complex and enduring geographies of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. While the rich body of scholarship in marine geography shows how representations of the ocean have primed it as a space of extraction and enclosure, this story contributes new insight, as, unlike in many cases, here the display of obfuscation rather than of information constructed the seabed as a resource frontier. The story’s portrayals in news, legislative sessions, industry circles, and international negotiations foregrounded its withholding of representation, creating an extractive frontier that competing political ideologies could appropriate to their respective ends. In and of itself this moment is an important one in the history of ocean territories, and more broadly it invites us to interrogate how we shape longlasting legal regimes around current representations of the sea.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104354"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144614373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The political ecology of asset manager capitalism and the harmful fiction of universal ownership","authors":"Klaudia Prodani ,&nbsp;Ekaterina Svetlova ,&nbsp;Casey R. Lynch ,&nbsp;Esther Turnhout","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104350","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104350","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>There is a surge of interest in the theory and promise of universal ownership – namely, the proposition that ‘universal owners’ like the Big Three (the three largest asset managers) will internalize and mitigate environmental harms due to their supposed exposure to the entire universe of listed companies. The theory has elated the communication departments of institutional investors and their asset managers as well as much of academia. Drawing on political economy scholarship on asset manager capitalism, political ecology, and civil society research, we suggest that the theory of universal ownership is a harmful fiction – so-called universal owners are far from universal as they hardly invest in agricultural producers in the Global South, who will bear the brunt of the impacts of ecological degradation. We screen the equity portfolios of the Big Three and a lesser-known asset manager, Dimensional Fund Advisors, against a new database of companies involved in palm oil-related deforestation in Southeast Asia. We find that Dimensional holds a greater number of palm oil producers based in the region while the Big Three are primarily invested in the larger consumer goods companies based in the Global North that fuel demand for palm oil yet offload the ecological destruction associated with its production to distant suppliers in the Global South. The contrasting geographies of their portfolios not only challenge notions of universality but also point to a hitherto unexamined ‘politico-ecological private authority’ of index providers. We conclude by suggesting that collaborating with civil society organizations to ‘follow the money’ from the ground up is indispensable to the ability of scholars to put forth novel accounts of asset manager capitalism as a means of organizing space and nature.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"165 ","pages":"Article 104350"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144605741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Community culture and development challenges in left behind places: the impact of historical legacies in the South Wales Valleys","authors":"Emma Halford ,&nbsp;Robert Huggins ,&nbsp;Richard Gale","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104353","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104353","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>So-called ‘left behind places’ often face significant development challenges due to entrenched path dependencies. A key policy issue is that interventions may fail to account for the influence of community culture, which remains shaped by historical legacies. This paper examines how historical continuity and adaptive change interact to form contemporary community culture in the Rhondda and Cynon Valleys of South Wales, UK. It finds that in these former coal mining areas local cultural contexts are central to understanding the persistence of ‘left behindness’, with inherited cultural traits both enabling and constraining development. In particular, strong traditions of community collective action continue to engender resilience but often manifest in a ‘survivalist’ rather than forward-looking orientation. However, the study also identifies instances where ‘left behindness’ has catalysed both individual and collective agency, leading to positive local development. Effective leadership emerges as a key factor in overcoming cultural inertia and unlocking new opportunities. The findings highlight the need for policies that engage with community culture as a dynamic developmental force, leveraging its strengths while addressing its constraints to promote more sustainable development pathways.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"164 ","pages":"Article 104353"},"PeriodicalIF":3.4,"publicationDate":"2025-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144523180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}