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The concept of resilience has been captured by a neoliberal discourse displacing responsibility to individuals and regions. This article specifically examines the regional labour market resilience of workers and other regional stakeholders relating to an ongoing economic restructuring process of deindustrialization and redundancies in Anglesey, North West Wales, in the UK. Using 11 years of longitudinal qualitative research, we provide an empirical narrative that applies a labour market resilience framework (challenge, context, responses and outcomes) from a workers' perspective. It connects the empirical findings from this critical case study to broader generalizability for regional studies and regional policy implications. Regarding generalizability to regional studies theory, the labour market resilience of workers is impacted at different but interlinking levels: the global systemic level of neo-liberal capitalism; the national country level of institutional varieties of capitalism (liberal market economies versus coordinated market economies); and regional variations across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orthodox supply-side human capital theory (HCT) paradigm is inadequate for understanding and adjusting to labour market volatility in UK regional economies like Wales. This article explores the role of regional labour market intermediaries (LMIs) in matching supply (skills) and demand (job opportunities) in regional labour markets. Some LMIs emerge because the HCT paradigm is failing. One Welsh LMI, Shaping the Future (StF), is explored empirically using qualitative methods. StF mainly adopted HCT tenets, but with some emergent demand-side focus. Despite helping workers adjust to labour market shocks, LMIs are not equipped to fix the structural demand-side problem of finite quality job opportunities in deindustrialized regions that accentuate skill use. A broader ‘skill eco-system’ paradigm is required, emphasising the foundational economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Direct action campaigns against new roads in the UK received much attention, but campaign groups were locally organised and little is known about how they worked. Protests by three local environmental direct action groups in the years 1992-2001 are examined. Their repertoire was confrontational, targeted mainly at business and the state. Most protests were small-scale and most were unreported in either local or national media. In the larger groups, in Manchester and Oxford, most actions were carried out locally and direct action groups worked mainly alone. In the smaller Bangor group, campaigners sometimes needed alliances with less radical groups to campaign effectively, and travelled more to events outside their locality. Environmental direct action groups remain largely autonomous from strategic alliances. Their protests are challenges to the norms underlying political and capitalist institutions rather than calculated attempts to influence government. Evidence that their actions were affecting public debate sustained and revitalised action more than did changes in political opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The third meeting of the European Social Forum (ESF) was held in London during October 2004 with a broad ranging formal agenda and a penumbra of affiliated workshops and cultural activities. We draw on participant observation in all sessions dealing with science and genomics and offer an evaluation of Rothman's (2000) argument that NGOs and protest movements have a vital role to play in consolidating and disseminating the UN Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. The paper positions the ESF as a constituent part of the World Social Forum network, identifies the key ESF networks and actors concerned with science and genomics, and analyses the various action, grievance and mobilisation frames generated within the 2004 ESF. It concludes with a discussion of the potential of this networked movement milieu to realise the goals identified in Rothman's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Blackwood (South Wales) roads protest during February to April 2004 as a case study, the article discusses the potential for a re-emergence of UK eco-action, examining the possibility that re-engagement with ‘single issue’ environmental protests is a probable direction for the UK direct action movement. Tactically and strategically, Blackwood could be a signifier for a new environmentally focused ‘cycle of contention’ which explicitly makes the links between the environment/climate change, and the frames of oil, war and capitalism which have been some of the key discursive repertoires of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movement(s). A potential return to ‘single issue’ eco-action should not be seen as ‘wheel reinvention’ but rather evidence of a movement which has reflexively built capacity over an activist generation. The article provides evidence of predisposed and latent mobilisation potential; emergent networks and campaigns focusing on eco-action in the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological sabotage (ecotage) has been a feature of the more radical parts of the environmental movement in the Western world for several decades. While it may be perceived as being the preserve of underground cells of 'eco-terrorists', in the UK those who carry out small-scale acts of sabotage are also often engaged in relatively conventional political activity; view sabotage as a complement to other action, not as an end in itself; and are committed to avoiding physical harm to people. Drawing on ethnographic data from research with British activists, this article seeks to define ecotage and to explain its place in the repertoires of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. It is argued that the self-limiting form of ecotage in the UK has its roots in cross-movement debates that have developed over several decades and that national traditions remain important in understanding the development of social movement repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the protests against high fuel prices in 2000 and their implications for the environmental movement in Great Britain. Public support for the protests; Relationship between environmental groups and the fuel protesters; Active participation of farmers in the protests.