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In this paper we raise the question of how commuter families create a work-family balance in a situation of incongruity of the geographical scales of work and family. Commuter families combine the work location of a commuting parent on the (inter)national scale, with the home-based parent's work location and the family home on the local scale. The commuting parent experiences a compartmentalized workweek, while the home-based parent is a single parent on those days. The results indicate two types of work-family balance. In the traditionalizing type, the father concentrates full time on paid work and the mother is the family caregiver both when the father is at work and at home. In the egalitarian type, both parents participate in paid work for at least four days a week. Family care in these egalitarian families is coordinated by the home-based parent (female or male) and shared by both parents during the weekends. The work-family balance of a commuter family involves some sacrifice, but also substantial enrichment. The empirical evidence is derived from a small-scale data set of 30 in-depth interviews with both parents in 15 commuter families in the Netherlands.

The Guatemalan educational system has been the most unequal system in the Latin American region ever since the 1950s. The indigenous Maya people, who constitute around half of the population, experienced the state mainly through repression, exploitative labour relationships and exclusion from education. The return to democracy and the peace process instilled great hopes for real change in many civil society organisations, including the Maya movement. Through their participation in national commissions, many of their demands were included in the Peace Accords of 1996. As regards the educational system, the main focus was on the greater participation of civil society, the expansion of educational opportunities, and an overall multicultural educational reform that sought to include the Maya culture and languages in the curriculum. A decade later, most of the agreements have been discredited. Powerful national and international actors have marginalised and undermined nearly all the civil society initiatives through a parallel decentralisation programme that puts the greatest burden on the shoulders of the poorest and the indigenous people. The paper critically analyses the history of the struggles since the Peace Accords, the divergent agendas and the debateable educational outcomes.

In the latest generation of large-scale European peripheral development projects, a growing ambition is visible to plan more urban environments. We refer to this intention as planning for "new urbanity" since the aim is to reintroduce into a new timeframe and location the traditional urban concepts of density and mixing uses. Empirical evidence shows, however, that the path to realize such ambitions has been very difficult. This article presents a study on governance factors influencing the trajectory from initial ambitions towards the first physical results in three cases. An analysis is made of the different dimensions of framing of these projects in their respective metropolitan action space and of the rules that structure their operational domains. This is the basis to question the extent to which the ambition for new urbanity has developed in a social norm influencing acceptable behaviour among actors. The conclusion is that the narrowly defined operation spheres of these projects are weakly connected to important societal domains that could have better supported these ambitions. New urbanity has, therefore, predominantly remained a disconnected, free-floating, "good idea" without strong material results. It is also in danger of becoming an extremely privatized planning concept, deviating from its original spatial and socially integrative nature.

Large-scale development projects have frequently been interpreted as products of neo-liberal policies. Many of them have been fiercely criticized because of their closed governance settings and their negative local spatial impacts. What space is left in them for a more progressive planning agenda? This article presents an empirical investigation of a major mixed-use large-scale development, the Ørestad project in Copenhagen. Although Ørestad is certainly representative of a timeframe in which Danish urban policies shifted strongly towards neo-liberal competition-oriented approaches, this project aimed to develop a progressive agenda as well. Our study analyses its success and failures and discusses the possibilities, inspired by North-American and Pacific-Asian examples, for stimulating a progressive agenda in these kinds of urban interventions.

In this article, we examine the process of trade liberalisation of educational services in the framework of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Specifically, we analyse the factors that influence the undertaking of commitments on educational liberalisation by the member countries of the WTO. The text is divided into three parts. In the first, we examine in detail the methodology of GATS negotiation. Second, in order to measure the degree of liberalisation of educational services in the countries we construct an index called EduGATS. Finally, we review and analyse the commitments on liberalisation consolidated by member countries in terms of educational services. The sources of the primary data are the lists of commitments on services of the members of the WTO, interviews with delegations from member countries, documents on the position of various delegations and documents from the WTO Council for Trade in Services.

Zorlu A. and Mulder C. H. Initial and subsequent location choices of immigrants to the Netherlands, Regional Studies 41, 1–20. The initial settlement behaviour and the subsequent mobility of immigrants who arrived in the Netherlands in 1999 are examined using rich administrative individual data. The study considers the settlement patterns of immigrants from various countries of origin who entered the country as labour, family or asylum migrants. The evidence suggests distinct settlement trajectories for asylum and other non-Western immigrants. The presence of co-ethnics and members of other ethnic minorities, but also socio-economic neighbourhood characteristics, appear to play an important role in determining location choice. Differences in the settlement and spatial mobility patterns of immigrants with various degrees of distance from the native Dutch in terms of human and financial capital, proficiency in the relevant language(s), and religion confirm the main predictions of spatial assimilation theory...

For more than a century, state and sub-state nationalisms have competed in the Basque borderland. At present, this competition implies contested imaginations of the Franco-Spanish borderland. This article explores these imaginations in terms of cross-border and intra-state integration. Nationalist rhetoric substantially differs from daily cultural experiences and political practice. Paradoxically, the opening-up of the Franco-Spanish border as a result of European integration and the concomitant rise of cross-border cooperation have confined Basque national integration to the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country. In this respect, both the old state border and internal administrative borders in Spain have acted as strong barriers against the diffusion of ethnonationalism.

In this paper a start is made in developing a conceptual model for the governability of a particular societal system based upon the (inter)active perspective on governance.Governability is seen as consisting of three main components, a system-to-be-governed (SG), a governance system (GS), and the interactions between these two (GI). The basis for conceptualizing the GS is the primary processes in which societal sectors specialize. These processes show characteristics by which they can be analyzed, such as their diversity, dynamics and complexity. The GS can be operationalized according to aspects of governance activities: elements, modes and orders of governance, and in the three major societal governance institutions: state, market, civil society and increasingly hybrid forms among them. The article also discusses the GI where one input is from the SG to the GS, defined as participatory interactions, and another from the GS to the SG which is seen as policy and management driven forms of interactions. Together these major governability components form a conceptual basis to analyze and eventually assess the governability of a particular societal sector, such as a fishery, a coastal zone or in fact any societal sector.

This paper introduces a special issue of Regional Studies on 'Globalization, City-Regions and Polycentricity in North West Europe'. The issue focuses on the thematic core of the EU-funded project POLYNET: the analysis of economic connections and information flows generated by advanced producer services in eight European polycentric city-regions. The paper first discusses key elements of the current debate on global city-regions and points out some unresolved gaps. A summary of the main findings of the contributions to the special issue is followed by a research agenda for future work on emerging mega-city regions.

There is substantial interest among policy makers in both Western Europe and North America in reducing concentrations of disadvantaged households through initiatives to enhance the ‘social mix’ of neighbourhoods. However, there is little consideration or understanding with regard to which mix of household characteristics matters most in influencing the socio-economic outcomes for individual residents. This paper explores the degree to which a wide variety of 1995 neighbourhood conditions in Sweden are statistically related to earnings for all adult metropolitan and non-metropolitan men and women during the 1996–99 period, controlling for a wide variety of personal characteristics. The paper finds that the extremes of the neighbourhood income distribution, operationalized by the percentages of adult males with earnings in the lowest 30th and the highest 30th percentiles, hold greater explanatory power than domains of household mix related to education, ethnicity or housing tenure. Separating the effects of...

When households move they obviously weigh both the quality of the house and the quality of the neighbourhood in their decision process. But, to the extent that housing quality and neighbourhood quality are inter-twined it is difficult to disentangle the extent to which households are more focused on one or another of these two components of the choice process. This paper uses both cross-tabulations of the neighbourhood choices, and logit models of the actual choices, to examine the relative roles of neighbourhoods and houses in the choice process. The research is focused on the question of the extent to which households trade up in house quality, or neighbourhood quality or both, as outcomes of residential mobility. The research measures neighbourhood quality in both socio-economic and environmental dimensions. The study shows that many households not only move up in housing quality, but quite consistently also make gains in neighbourhood quality, often independently of gains in housing quality. Not surpr...

This article assesses the contribution of discourse analysis to the study of environmental politics over the period of the past decade. Defining discourse as a particular linguistic regularity that can be found in conversations distinguishes it from ‘deliberation’ and ‘discussion’. Discourse analysis is seen as focused on situational logics studying ‘language-in-use’.Three strengths of discourse analysis are highlighted: its capacity to reveal the role of language in politics, its capacity to reveal the embeddedness of language in practices and its capacity to answer ‘how’ questions and to illuminate mechanisms. The article concludes by sketching some of the challenges lying ahead of discourse analysis. Given the changing nature of policy making, discourse analysts are supposed to have a task in identifying the new sites of politics and analysing the political dynamics therein.

Since the beginning of the 1970s the under‐representation of women in geography has been questioned in several publications. Most articles refer to the situation in English‐speaking countries. This paper examines the vertical and horizontal gender segregation in human geography departments in Dutch universities. In spite of several policy measures to promote equal opportunity, women form only 19 per cent of all human geography faculty. In the conclusion, consequences and dilemmas related to gender representation and segregation are discussed.

Data for 1977 and 1995/96 are used to study (changes in) the effects of the partners’ resources on long‐distance migration of couples in the Netherlands. The analyses were performed separately for couples with employed and with non‐employed women. In 1977, couples with non‐employed women showed the classical pattern of family migration, with strong effects of the human capital and labour market characteristics of the male and the females mostly using their power to prevent migration. The couples with employed women, on the other hand, in 1977 already showed a more modern pattern of family migration. The effects of the male’s occupational prestige and sector were not significant for these couples and an age advantage of the male did not lead to more migration. Over time, the position of the employed women seems to have become even stronger and our results suggest that in 1996 at least some of them were able to initiate a move for their own career and hence to turn their husband into a tied mover.

This Symposium integrates quantitative and qualitative information to assess the representation of women in academic geography in The Netherlands, Catalonia, Hungary and Singapore. It offers comparative commentary on the situation in the United States and additionally a focus on the experiences of a group of women geographers of colour in Canada, the US and the UK. Through this cross‐national approach, the significance of context in shaping the representation of women geographers becomes apparent, especially the importance of political economy and of shifting labour markets. The papers also make clear the intersections between the gender make‐up of the profession, the nature of the curriculum, and students' experiences. They document strategies employed to change women's representation.

In this chapter we analyse the Higher Education For All (HEFA) policies and practices in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. In the construction of a 21st Century Socialism, universal access to higher education has not only become a constitutional right but assumes a pivotal role in both the repayment of the social debt and in the country’s ‘endogenous development’. We contextualise HEFA with exclusion from access to lower education levels under 1990s neoliberalism and draw attention to the non-formal education programmes (missions), which support the HEFA policies. We explore the strategic role ascribed to HE in the Bolivarian government’s pursuance of social transformation and argue that HEFA poses a counter-hegemonic challenge to the prevalent global HE agenda of commoditisation and privatisation. We conclude that Venezuela’s holistic approach towards a more egalitarian society should receive substantially more attention by the international education and development community than is currently the case.

Today, the development of many rural communities in the Ashanti Region of Ghana is to a considerable extent being supported by migrants. Community development is defi ned here as the activities to arrive at an increased presence of, or improved access to, public (not commercially exploited) facilities at the village level. These include facilities that are fi nanced with both public funds and private funds, both locally and from migrants. In spite of the wealth of publications about migrant remittances and community development, few studies have investigated the processes that take place in the communities where the migrant support arrives and that can infl uence successful involvement of migrants in community development. Knowledge about these processes is important because it may explain why some communities are successful in involving migrants in the development of their communities although others are not. Some exceptions of studies that do pay more attention to these processes are Cotula and Toulmin (2004), Akolongo (2005), and Mohan (2006). However, much of the literature either describes the types of migrant support and the impact on communities, or focuses on the motivations and characteristics of senders (e.g., Addison, 2004; Levitt & Nyberg-Sorensen, 2004; Higazi, 2005; Loup, 2005; Orozco, 2005; World Bank, 2006).

The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), negotiated within the World Trade Organization (WTO), has become the main instrument for the transnationalisation of higher education. It promotes trade liberalisation in services and, thereby, the consumption of distance courses and degrees in foreign countries, the development of multinational universities and international teacher and researcher mobility. This liberalization process intends to modify, eliminate and/or harmonize a large set of regulations and laws, both national and local, in order to advance the constitution of a free trade in education international regime. For this reason, GATS/WTO is considered a key element in the current global governance of education. This chapter addresses the negotiation process of GATS on Higher Education, and the rationale of the construction process of a new transnational education trade regime through a social constructivist approach. Specifically, it explores the strategies, ideas and positions of countries within the process, and how these elements affect the development and form of this new global regime. The primary data sources are interviews with GATS negotiators and the staff of the WTO.

What impact do neighbourhoods have on social mobility? For years, this question has received widespread international attention in scholarly debates and within society at large. This paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by presenting the results of an investigation into the relationship between household social mobility and the composition of the residential environment. The analyses are based on an extensive empirical longitudinal study conducted in the Netherlands. The most remarkable conclusion is that, in the Dutch context, the environment has only a modest influence on the social mobility of households with a weak economic position. It was found that the chance of a household living purely on welfare benefits at the beginning of the study period to escape the ‘welfare trap’ was barely dependent on the number of similarly challenged households in the immediate vicinity. Interestingly, the environment proved to have a more powerful effect on the social mobility of households with a stronger economic position. The probability that households with at least one paid job at the beginning of the research would still have a job at the end clearly decreases as the share of benefit-dependent households in the neighbourhood rises. A possible explanation for this is that for the first category (weak starting position) the negative effect of their own welfare situation is far more determinative for their future prospects than the composition of their environment. Because these negative individualistic conditions are absent for the second category (stronger starting position), environmental factors may play a relatively larger role. Another interpretation is that area-based policies are not just targeting the areas with bigger problems more intensively, but especially the long-term unemployed in these areas, and not so much the short-term unemployed (those who had a job at the start of the research period and lost the job afterwards).