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This paper investigates cultural dimensions and processes of exclusion in rural Ireland and Russia that impact upon marginalised rural people by making them poor. It employs Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1977) concept of cultural capital, which provides understanding of both structural effects of cultural discrimination and individual strategies of cultural reproduction on well-being. First, it explores the function of cultural capital as a power resource that can be used to monopolise certain cultural preferences. Second, the paper studies the function of cultural capital to mark cultural distance and to put people with less-valued cultural resources in a disadvantaged position that can limit poor people’s access to social settings and resources. Third, the paper investigates the function of cultural capital to exclude individuals by means of regulating their aspirations and cultural dispositions, which degrade social bonds and limit people’s sources of economic growth. The results of this study reveal the complexity of classificatory effects of cultural practices on poverty and argue against treating culture as a residual category in poverty studies. It takes on board the findings from this study to critically re-evaluate certain stereotypes of hardship and to articulate the need for a broader understanding of rural poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the evolution of China Mobile - one of China's pioneer 'national champions', and one of the world's largest telecom companies - through the lens of global financial networks, focusing on the role of advanced business services, financial centres and offshore jurisdictions in economic development. It demonstrates that despite being a domestic company, China Mobile is plugged firmly into the global financial networks, with incorporation in Hong Kong, cross-listing in Hong Kong and New York, and opaque offshore companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. Global advanced business services firms, with Goldman Sachs in the lead, have been instrumental in the very conception of China Mobile in 1997 and its subsequent expansion, thus helping the Chinese government consolidate and modernise the whole telecom sector. The study highlights the position of Hong Kong as an onshore-offshore financial centre intermediating between global financial markets and mainland China, and underwriting the reputation of China's 'national champions'. The analysis also points to the advantages of Beijing over Shanghai as a command centre of state-owned and controlled enterprises, acting as a magnet for advanced business services. The relevance of global financial networks to China, a latecomer on the stage of financial globalisation, highlights the scope for applying the concept to the rest of the world, and its potential contribution to economic geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the globalization of economic life and a myriad of powerful challenges to Westphalian traditions of political statehood, it is now routinely contended that regions are‘in resurgence’. Nonetheless, much of the debate on this purported regional renaissance is bedevilled by confusion over what scholars and activists mean by regions and an analogous mystification as to why some regions are‘successful’,‘lagging’ or‘different’. Our paper aims to instil some coherence to this debate by distinguishing between what we termregional spacesandspaces of regionalism. It then draws on this distinction to explore the institutionalization of England's South West region, highlighting some tensions which prevail over its economic future, its political representation, its territorial shape and cultural vernacular. In undertaking this, we demonstrate how the formation of any given regional map is reflective– and indeed constitutive– of an unevenly developing, often overlapping and superimposing mosaic of economic practices, political mobilizations, cultural performances and institutional accomplishments. This prompts us to question the currently fashionable inclination to fully jettison a scalar and/or territorial approach to the theory and practice of spatiality in favour of relational/topological/non-territorial approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks– such as the global commodity chain approach– has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross-border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of‘globalization’. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross-border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo-economics of intra-regional competition), land (including post-colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the‘borderless world’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research evidence and pleas that humans are undermining their own survival on a robust and unforgiving planet seem to be falling on deaf ears. The drive for economic and military security remains more powerful than the evidence that both of these objectives are being undermined by environmental damage, social disruption, unjust treatment and forced migration. Yet the signs are growing that environmentally and socially sound futures may be vital prerequisites for economic and military stability. So, at the heart of multi-nationalism, sustainable development is beginning to be recognized as a crucial element in reliable international agreements. The consequence of all this is that environmental science has become highly political, and geographers need to recognize and work within an expanding political process. Examples of new forms of governing via sustainability science for sustainable futures are offered in the latter part of the paper, especially at local government level. The antagonistic pressures of established power and economic hegemony are never far away. Indeed, the confirmation of these established patterns of power still pervades the politics of environmental science. But it is possible that these antagonistic political frameworks are beginning to be transcended by the more influential aspects of sustainability partnerships incorporating new arrangements between government, private capital and civil associations. These partnerships will not be easy to create, for they criss-cross boundaries of familiarity and rules of operation. But geographers can play a critical role in helping to shape them and assess the best circumstances for ensuring their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research on local and regional economic development has focused upon transformations in local governance and institutional capacity. It has been argued that local authorities have ceded power to other actors and institutions involved in economic development and regeneration, and that the success of local and regional economic development is closely related to the strength of ‘institutional capacity’ within an area. In this paper, we examine these claims with reference to the operation of EU Structural Funds in the Humber Sub-region of the UK. Previous research on local governance and institutional capacity has had a limited empirical focus, drawing conclusions from studies of either economically ‘successful’ regions or regions undergoing regulatory and institutional transformation and precluding analysis of the nature and conditions of local governance and institutional capacity in less developed regions. Our case study evidence not only suggests that arguments about the declining influence of the local state are overdrawn, but also indicates a need for more nuanced accounts of the role of institutional capacity in regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically evaluates the ways in which Southern development actors, such as India and China, discursively construct the 'aid' element of South-South development cooperation. It draws upon gift theory, something that has previously been confined to analyses of Western foreign aid. Four characteristic features of the symbolic regime of South-South development cooperation are identified: the assertion of a shared 'developing country' identity; expertise in appropriate development; rejection of hierarchical 'donor-recipient' relations; and an insistence on mutual opportunity. All of these set up the positive moral valence of reciprocity, something that stands in contrast to the hegemonic public construction (if not the reality) of Western foreign aid as unreciprocated charity to the less fortunate. The paper then examines what this symbolic regime might seek to 'euphemise' or obscure in the realpolitik of South-South relations, including inattention to the contested sub-national politics of 'development', and the growing differences amongst the G77 nations. The paper is concerned with the ways in which Southern development actors represent a challenge to the dominant aid paradigm, transgressing dominant cultural categories and social hierarchies of who gives and who receives; but it refuses to take claims of South-South solidarity and mutual benefit at face value. It concludes with some brief reflections on the implications of the emerging visibility and power of the Southern development partners for critical 'development' geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]