Political Geography最新文献

{"title":"Green national paradox? How the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor","authors":"Andreas Malm ,&nbsp;Kristoffer Ekberg ,&nbsp;Christina Englund ,&nbsp;Johanne Tagmose Grønkjær ,&nbsp;Martin Charlier ,&nbsp;Olivia Medin ,&nbsp;Ståle Holgersen","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103390","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103390","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sweden has swiftly transitioned from being considered a progressive pioneer in climate mitigation to the forefront of late obstruction. The proximate cause was the general elections in 2022, after which the Sweden Democrats (SD) gained authority over the country's climate policies. This paper explores how the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor, and discuss if this transition is also an expression of a ‘green national paradox’. Through interviews with SD members and analysis of political documents, we observe how the SD <em>explicitly</em> and <em>extensively</em> exploits Sweden's progressive image to justify its obstructionist climate agenda. Focusing on energy and transportation policies, our study delves into the SD's perception of Sweden's global climate role and discusses how this is used by the far right in their policies towards climate mitigation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103390"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144665960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Salvage work: The making of movable nature for post-submergence life","authors":"Ekin Kurtiç","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103357","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103357","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article critically examines environmental salvage projects undertaken in northeastern Turkey by focusing on political and technoscientific actors who design and implement them. In 2012, Turkey's first project to salvage rare plants before their submergence in a dam reservoir was implemented in the Çoruh Valley. This was the first instance of resettlement and restoration efforts associated with large dams to encompass plant life. A few years later, when another dam upstream was to be built in the same valley, fruit trees and fertile soil were designated as valuable ecologies to be salvaged. By examining these state-led projects, this article examines the inextricable relationship between ruination and restoration, in which state officials and experts play a central role. I argue that state-led salvage projects legitimize and exacerbate the very ruination they claim to mitigate by portraying it as inevitable. The governmental practice of making nature movable is a salvage work that ends up moving nature out of the way of infrastructure and extraction projects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103357"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144634137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Violent environments and the low-carbon energy transition: Cautionary tales from Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea","authors":"Emily Benton Hite ,&nbsp;Sarah Posner ,&nbsp;Jerry K. Jacka","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103389","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103389","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Two decades on, we seek to expand Peluso and Watt's seminal 'Violent Environments' (2001) with the advent of decarbonization efforts to transition to a low-carbon future, which can have violent outcomes for residing communities. Our expanded political ecology of violence coalesces the violences of extractivism inherent in the transition, which manifests at varying tempos (slow to fast) and degrees of legibility (invisible to visible). Our research in Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea highlights the violences that progress in new environments shaped by historical processes of colonialism and imperialism, accumulation by dispossession, climate change, and decarbonization efforts, among others. We offer to reorient our theoretical agenda in the era of the 'capitalocene' that critically identifies, scrutinizes, and attends to the myriad forms of violence that are correlated with a low-carbon energy transition. In conclusion, we urge social scientists to invoke a thoughtful engagement with violences, recognizing conflicts embroiled in politicized decarbonization efforts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103389"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144633781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From derisking to green extractivism: The Rioni Valley Movement and the coloniality of renewable infrastructure in Post-Soviet Georgia","authors":"Lela Rekhviashvili,&nbsp;Aleksandra Aroshvili","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103381","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103381","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Based on an analysis of the Rioni Valley Movement and the historical transformation of energy politics in Georgia, we challenge prevailing explanations of the promotion and contestation of hydropower infrastructure as driven by homegrown authoritarianism or Russia's (neo)imperial politics. Instead, we propose a framework of coloniality of infrastructure and green extractivism to study Georgia and other parts of the postsocialist East alongside the postcolonial contexts of the global South. The East increasingly resembles these contexts, exhibiting new iterations of coloniality in relation to the West/North, and serves as one of the frontiers of green extractivism. We argue that derisking has become integral to the mode of regulation that underpins green extractivism – a mode of capital accumulation by dispossession and appropriation in peripheries. Derisking creates an unequal distribution of risks and returns by requiring states to commit their fiscal capacities to future-proof investor returns at all costs. It assures that renewables are not just <em>extractive</em>, or harvesting energy, but <em>extractivist</em>, or serving distant people and geographies while aligning with the profitability needs of financial capital and the consumption needs of decarbonizing classes. Derisked renewables inflict harm locally and deepen the subaltern integration of (sub)national and world-regional peripheries within the capitalist world-ecology.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103381"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144634070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Seizing the means of innovation: On the relationship between Marxism and ecomodernism","authors":"Govand Khalid Azeez,&nbsp;Jonathan Symons","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103388","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103388","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent efforts to articulate a “socialist ecomodernist” politics have spurred debate over the relationship between Marxism and ecomodernism. Degrowth-aligned socialists critique ecomodernism for its productivism and naive techno-optimism; ecomodernist socialists respond that ecomodernism's grounding of ecological politics in human material needs and focus on production's technological metabolism broadly aligns with historical materialism. This paper first outlines the homologies and contradictions between Marxism and ecomodernism and then turns to one area of potential dialectical synthesis: addressing capitalism's ecological crises requires a systematic account of technological innovation. To this end we put forward eleven axioms distilling Marx's philosophico-anthropological account of technology. These axioms reflect Marx's understanding of technological innovation as both a source of tension, since productive forces consistently outpace the social world and the relations of production, and crucial to transcending class societies. We argue that a Marxist response to climate breakdown must address how a communist movement will manage the unintended, indirect ecological impacts of production. Marxists have always understood that the proletariat must control the means of production in order to address class-based inequality. In the era of climate breakdown, Marxists must be equally explicit about technological innovation. If we are to protect nature while progressing toward Marx's “realm of freedom”, the task now is also to seize and reconfigure the means of innovation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103388"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144581069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Urbanisation, democracy, and political regime transformations","authors":"Nick Dorward ,&nbsp;Sean Fox ,&nbsp;Kristian Hoelscher","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cities, and the process of urbanisation more broadly, have long been associated with political change – and democratisation in particular. However, there is little cross-country empirical research on the relationship between urbanisation and political change, and a tendency to conflate urbanisation with industrialisation and economic development. This gap is significant for two reasons. First, many of the hypothesised mechanisms linking urbanisation to political change are associated with socioeconomic changes driven by industrialisation and economic development. Second, many low- and middle-income countries have undergone rapid “urbanisation without industrialisation”. What then are the political consequences of urbanisation without industrialisation?</div><div>To answer this, we draw a key conceptual distinction between <em>urbanisation</em> – the increase in the relative share of a country's population living in urban areas – and <em>urban population scale</em> – the absolute size of urban populations. While much of the literature focuses upon the political implications of urbanisation, we argue that the sheer scale of urban populations may be more consequential for political change. Specifically, we suggest that although the hypothesised associations between urban living and democratic preferences among citizens are weak, urban living facilitates political engagement, and hence large urban populations may stimulate political change.</div><div>We test this hypothesis with cross-national regressions analysing the determinants of levels of democracy and episodes of political regime transformation since 1960 in 161 countries. We find no association between levels of urbanisation or urban population size and levels of democracy. By contrast, we find a positive and significant association between urban population size and political regime transformations, with a bias towards democratic change. Our study offers important insights into the relationship between urbanisation and political change and the political implications of rapid urbanisation without industrialisation unfolding in many parts of the world today.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103382"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144535921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Devolution and democratic engagement in England","authors":"Nicholas Patrick Sweeney","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103386","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103386","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Devolution is argued to enhance decision-making through allowing for representative place-based policy making by engaged local citizens. Meanwhile, voter participation in local elections in England is approximately one-third of the electorate, divided along demographic lines, raising questions over the democratic legitimacy of local policymaking. Leveraging a restricted dataset from The Elections Centre, my study provides the first detailed investigation into this relationship. Focusing on the six English devolved areas granted expanded powers in 2017, I employ a difference-in-differences approach on a panel of single-tier authorities spanning 2004–2022. I find that despite the transfer of greater local powers, devolution does not lead to any overall increase in democratic engagement, although these effects vary by devolved area. Also, there is no relationship between existing voting behaviour and the effect of devolution, suggesting cycles of political exclusion persist. My findings evidence a ‘geography of disengagement’, and the inefficacy of increased devolved powers in influencing these patterns, contesting the importance of representative policymaking under England's devolution framework, and place-based policies more generally, beyond a political rhetorical device.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103386"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144523496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Precarious work and local governance through the lens of informality and caring for place","authors":"Valeria Guarneros-Meza","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103380","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103380","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Against the backdrop of fiscal austerity and bordering discourses in the UK, precarious work has become increasingly important to understand local governance and provision of community services. This paper contends that precarity can be overcome through caring practices found in the social reproduction that communities develop in their everyday experience of place-making, but care is made invisible by the state's own contribution to informal governance arrangements. The paper aims to contribute to the study of precarity in England, by bringing into dialogue debates on work precarity, informality and popular economies. Through this framework the relationality between state and non-state actors can be studied through decentring the role of the state in the provision of community services. This framework recognises the hidden and ambiguous interfaces that co-exist, or are nested within each other, when local communities encounter marginality in social, organisational, political and economic ways. Through qualitative research carried out in Barnsley Metropolitan Borough in South Yorkshire, the paper unpacks how the visibility of material and social precarity are compounded with the invisibility of voluntary work in the initiatives organised by the local council and different community organisations when caring for others and place. Through the relations among individuals and community groups that stem from practices which render work invisible, networks of solidarity are formed, but they are not enough to develop more inclusive conditions for change.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103380"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144490439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Just climate experimentation: Distributive, procedural, and recognition justice in two low-carbon pilots in China","authors":"Yiqun Yang ,&nbsp;Kevin Lo","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103384","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103384","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Climate experiments—innovative measures taken to mitigate or adapt to climate change—have become a global driver of low-carbon transitions. However, the social justice aspects of climate experiments have not been adequately explored. This study theorizes just climate experimentation from three perspectives of justice. From a distributive justice perspective, climate experiments should fairly distribute costs and benefits, ensuring that communities receive direct advantages while mitigating negative impacts. Procedural justice requires informed consent and equal decision-making for communities. Recognition justice involves understanding and respecting the perspectives of affected local populations. We mobilized these ideas to empirically analyze the interactions between experimenters and local communities in two low-carbon pilots in China. We found that: (1) while experimenters benefited financially and politically from climate experimentation, local residents faced material and non-material burdens; (2) procedural justice issues include a lack of informed consent and meaningful community involvement; and (3) experimenters selectively acknowledged community perspectives, leading to some changes but also dismissing certain views.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103384"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144480997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Haunted Temporalities: Ghosts and the geohauntologies of the Iran-Iraq war and the production of the nation-state through martyrdom","authors":"Hanieh Molana","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103361","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103361","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) left enduring imprints on Iranian history, identity, landscape, and memory. The geographic remains and memories of the War can be easily observed in city landscapes, grave sites, museums, schoolbooks, city murals, films, and street names. But this paper seeks to geolocate the invisible traces of the War in a way that make an appearance today and how they are reproduced by the state. In this article, I argue for a reinterpretation of the Iran-Iraq War, its affective absence, and its geohaunting of a society's collective temporality. Through an ethnographic analysis of Tehran's National Museum of the Islamic Revolution and Holy Defence, the paper illuminates how these hauntings permeate public consciousness, and shape collective temporality. I present the concept of geohauntology to highlight the central geographical aspect of invisibilities, hauntings, memories, and ghosts in geographical research and in the study of memory and remembrance more broadly. I conclude by analyzing the ways in which the Iranian state strategically curates and controls these spectral presences, while mobilizing the ghosts of the Iran-Iraq War as instruments of governance, national memory, and ideological reinforcement.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103361"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144471396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}