Resilience has become a policy and practical framework for addressing a range of threats from natural disasters and extreme weather events to political conflicts and terrorism. Focusing on the context of cities, this paper offers a conceptualisation of urban resilience, critically interrogating its use for urban governance and the political implications it has for individual agency. The paper also seeks to contribute to the existing critical literature on urban resilience. The second part of the paper focuses on the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme as implemented in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile. Empirical data obtained through fieldwork and interviews with representatives of the public sector and civil society suggest that while creating an illusion of inclusiveness and empowerment, the ‘resilience approach’ has largely ignored the structural conditions of extreme social and spatial inequality in Santiago. Local political realities and private sector interests play an important part in this equation. The case study points to a general tendency to treat city resilience as a technical question, thereby downplaying its deeply political nature. It highlights the disconnection between the topography of risk on the one side and technological interventions on the other.
Perspectives on migrant integration differ by time and place. This article examines this vague concept to shed light on how its evolution over time has shaped the current conceptions of migrant integration in the EU and the Czech Republic. It describes the situation in the Czech Republic and the country's normative goals in the field of migrant integration. While the country has explicit integration priorities in place, there is no evaluation of their fulfilment. The article explores whether these priorities are indeed fulfilled and from what sources by analysing a unique dataset of 3061 projects in the field of migrant integration. All these projects were implemented in the Czech Republic between 2010 and 2019. The results show that although funding for migrant integration has increased since 2016, even taking into account the long-term increase in the number of migrants in the Czech Republic, funding in support of these priorities is allocated very unevenly. European funding remains crucial. Among the most supported priorities is knowledge of the Czech language and education. There is also some support in the social field. By contrast, the issues of discrimination, equal rights, foreign nationals' access to health care, and the development of professional skills receive hardly any support. The results thus show a discrepancy between the priorities that have been set and their fulfilment, especially in the area of activities targeting the majority society and its institutions. The declared two-sidedness to the process of integration process thus remains a somewhat unsupported vision.
At the turn of the 1990s, a very large part of UK energy utilities was transferred from the public sector into private ownership. When analysing the era of privatisation, recent research on public policy has concluded that public authorities’ ability to influence or shape national energy choices has been substantially weakened. Since the mid-2000s, however, tight cooperation between private investors and UK public regulators and policy-makers has emerged as a critical factor to meet the challenges posed by the energy transition. How have the British public authorities tried to get private actors on board and to involve them not only in the delivery and funding of energy services, as has been the case with public-private partnerships, but also in the decision-making process? This article identifies various schemes spearheaded by the UK government to breed or revive innovation in the privately-owned renewable and nuclear energy industries. This analysis explores the various strategies used to facilitate ‘decompartmentalising’ initiatives and ensure a smooth transition towards a neo-corporatist revival of the Triple Helix involving industry, academia, and government. It shows how these hybrid processes offer valuable insight for analysing and reconceptualising the boundary between the public and the private sectors. Based on this case study, this analysis ultimately demonstrates how the public/private dichotomy should be reassessed using the concepts of hybrid roles and responsibilities.
Globalization – multifactor phenomenon. Dimensions of globalization. The erosion of state power,global integration of the world and of most states result in the removal of barriers between national and internationalpolicies. The theory of governance: public power is no longer exercised exclusively by state, but its exerciseis participated in significantly by private supranational corporations and nongovernmental organizations. Onstate and global level governance includes the process of participation, negotiation and co-ordination. Its keyinstruments are projects, partnership and consensus – in the first place the knowledge of the process leading tothe achievement of consensus. There are know founding conditions within the existing international order thatrepresent something like a global constitution. Contemporary transition stage to it is global governance.