Geographical Journal最新文献

Mission-led governance has emerged as a popular policy approach to address complex societal challenges through ambitious, cross-sectoral goals. However, concerns persist about its top-down nature, lack of spatial sensitivity and potential incompatibility with place-based approaches. A particular concern is that it might marginalise rural areas. This commentary examines whether mission-led governance can deliver for rural communities by fostering vertical (multi-level) and horizontal (cross-departmental) policy integration to advance rural well-being. We juxtapose mission-led approaches with outcome-oriented well-being frameworks, highlighting lessons from international experiences in the United Kingdom and Europe. While both approaches share ambitions for systemic change, each faces challenges in their application to diverse places. Rural policy faces particular challenges, many of which require place-sensitive responses: siloed governance, urban-centric biases and loss of institutional capacity. We critique conventional rural proofing as reactive and consider three potential pathways for mission-led rural policy: (1) a dedicated rural mission to prioritise place-based needs, (2) embedding rural considerations within existing missions, or (3) a hybrid model combining mission-led steering with well-being framework principles. We argue for the third approach, emphasising participatory governance, flexible local targets that reflect place diversity, and cross-departmental accountability. Key lessons include the need for political leadership, aligned institutional incentives and co-creation with rural stakeholders. Without deliberate attention to rural spatial justice, mission-led policies risk perpetuating inequalities. We conclude that missions could revitalise rural governance if reconfigured as collaborative, multi-level endeavours, offering a timely alternative to fragmented policy. The paper also identifies future research directions.

Historical boundaries often play a crucial role in shaping regional identities and can be significant tourist attractions. Despite a long tradition of researching borders in tourism, current studies on historical (particularly former de jure administrative and state) boundaries as tourist attractions are insufficient. Hence, this article aims to help fill this lacuna by investigating obstacles to the commodification of historical borders in tourism. A fruitful distinction between two types of historical boundary – relict and phantom borders – is proposed: the relict border refers to a boundary itself (or its relicts in the landscape) which may unite people through tourism, whereas the phantom border continues to divide somehow dissimilar (phantom) regions. Since different people may generally interpret the historical boundary differently, it is crucial to ask ordinary, local people about their perceptions of such a boundary, as it may prevent and resolve potential conflicts among stakeholders. Hindrances to the touristification of historical boundaries are investigated using the boundary between the Czech historical lands of Bohemia and Moravia as an example, asking 454 residents of the historical borderland about the functions and meanings they associate with this boundary. The Bohemian–Moravian boundary may be seen as both a relict border, since it persists and manifests itself in the landscape, and a phantom border, since it separates Bohemia and Moravia with unique regional identities. Two fundamental obstacles to this historical border's commodification in tourism are revealed: an ignorance of its location and a perceived negative meaning associated with Moravian regionalism or even separatism among some respondents. Although the result is context-dependent, it implies that concerning historical boundary touristification in general, people must first learn (or refresh their knowledge about) where a historical boundary lies, consider the potentially negative meanings (fears) associated with such a border, properly evaluate the consequent threats, and prevent any future negative impacts.

International travel is a key source of academic greenhouse gas emissions and, therefore, is a priority for the sector's decarbonisation efforts. However, legacies of colonisation and carbon-intensive development mean that the global geography of knowledge production and exchange is highly concentrated in Europe and North America, notwithstanding increased access through decarbonisation initiatives such as conference hubs. This commentary draws on attendee experiences of two remote conference hubs, held in Nairobi, Kenya and Melbourne, Australia, in parallel with the hybrid 2023 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG) conference, for which the in-person event was held in London. The varied experiences of these Nairobi and Melbourne RGS hubs highlight the plurality of peripheries, and how one's location within a continuum of peripheralisation shapes how academics from these sites are engaged in and can respond to academic decarbonisation efforts. We argue that the reproduction of Europe and North America as the centres of knowledge necessitates increased cognisance of the potentially conflicted aims of inclusion and the decarbonisation of academia, especially on academic peripheries. Ultimately, our argument is not against the decarbonisation of academia, which we view as critical against climate breakdown, but, rather, for greater attention to the decentring of knowledge production and its methods of transfer in decarbonisation efforts.

Once an industrial powerhouse, Teesside is positioned as a key player in the UK's Net Zero Strategy, with plans to revitalise its deindustrialised industrial clusters through decarbonisation and green energy projects. Using a series of proposed energy-from-waste incinerators in Teesside as a lens, I examine how the UK's green industrial strategy legitimises ongoing pollution under the guise of sustainability, enabled by regulatory frameworks that define harm within narrow, scientifically provable parameters. This limited framing fails to capture the full scope of harm, allowing chemical toxicity to disproportionately impact marginalised communities. In this piece, I advocate for epistemic justice that expands how harm is recognised beyond measurable metrics and takes seriously community knowledges of the lived and embodied experience of industrial pollution in Teesside. This approach supports the development of an affective politics of resistance that draws from a collective awareness of how environmental harm reshapes bodily capacities and subjectivities to catalyse new forms of political action.

In Britain, ethnic minorities have long been disproportionately likely to live in overcrowded homes and to experience other forms of housing disadvantage. However, in recent years, housing policy across Great Britain has retreated away from acknowledging and seeking to address these ethnic disparities. This study critically assesses the evidence for this policy shift by examining the contemporary magnitude and geography of ethnic disparities in overcrowding across England and Wales. This is achieved by analysing 2021 Census microdata using multilevel logistic regressions. The results show that even after controlling for differences in the demographic and socio-economic attributes of ethnic groups, almost all ethnic minorities have a substantially higher propensity to live in overcrowded homes than comparable White Britons. In addition, while overcrowding is generally more common in places where housing constraints are more acute, ethnic disparities in overcrowding vary geographically in more complex and group-specific ways. Taken together, these findings indicate that longstanding patterns of ethnic housing disparity have not faded away. Greater recognition of these persistent inequalities and renewed efforts to address them thus need to be built back into local and national housing policies.

This study investigates the ecological environment quality within Bangladesh's Jamuna River Basin from 2003 to 2023, using Landsat imagery analysed through Google Earth Engine (GEE) to create the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) for the districts of Kurigram, Sirajganj and Tangail. The analysis reveals significant spatial and temporal variations in ecological health, driven by both anthropogenic and natural factors. The findings show that whilst Kurigram's ecological quality fluctuates between good and moderate states, Sirajganj has experienced a continuous decline, and Tangail shows marked ecological degradation, especially in urban areas. The study demonstrates that the integration of RSEI with spatial autocorrelation techniques, such as Moran's I and Local Indicator of Spatial Autocorrelation (LISA), effectively captures spatial clustering of ecological quality. The clustering patterns indicate that ecological degradation is unevenly distributed, influenced by both human activities and natural processes. These results emphasise the importance of sustainable land management practices to mitigate further ecological decline and provide a foundation for targeted conservation efforts. The study's use of geospatial tools offers a scalable approach for assessing ecological health in other river basins and regions facing environmental pressures. This research underscores the critical role of monitoring long-term ecological changes to inform policy interventions and promote sustainable development in vulnerable ecosystems.

This study advances scholarship in animal geography by examining how dogs participate in the processual and relational making and unmaking of home within the context of global lifestyle migration. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork with 36 participants in Lijiang Ancient Town, China, this study traces the spatial-affective entanglements between lifestyle migrants and their companion dogs. It reveals how dogs co-construct multispecies domesticities through embodied practices—such as scent-marking, route repetition and place attachment—that extend beyond the boundaries of human-centred home imaginaries. However, these fragile multispecies arrangements are destabilised when migration results in abandonment. In such moments, dogs are forced to navigate disrupted relational geographies and shifting territorialities, marked by anxiety, behavioural change and dislocation. To conceptualise these experiences, the study introduces the notion of ‘trans-species traumatic geographies’, capturing the spatial and emotional consequences of rupture for non-human companions. By foregrounding canine perspectives and embodied vulnerabilities, this study challenges the anthropocentric focus of migration narratives and underscores the co-constitutive nature of homemaking across species. It contributes to critical conversations on multispecies mobility and displacement, and the ethics of human–animal domesticity in an era of global movement.

Austerity across Europe and other parts of the world has become a go-to socio-economic policy, supporting and enriching neoliberal principles of a shrinking state, financial self-responsibilisation and welfare conditionality. This Special Section presents a new approach to understanding contemporary austerity by focusing on legacies. In this introduction, we illustrate how the lens of legacies can be applied to understanding the aftermath of austerity, in terms of how austerity's legacies are lived out, passed on and become manifest in daily life. More specifically, we highlight the significance of policy, social, and material legacies, including where they overlap and interweave. Supported by seven papers and an afterword, this collection advances debates within geography about the space-times of austerity as they condition present and future geographies.

The multi-scalar nature of Islamophobia highlights how it spares no spatial scale (from the globe to the body). However, Islamophobia is also a multi-dimensional nature that affects all places and sectors of our societies (whether political, institutional, educational, etc.). This article aims to reinforce this dual nature by using the notion of ‘Everywhere Islamophobia’, in light of theories showing that racism is everywhere. The everywhereness of Islamophobia even within the discipline of geography has been recognised late, compared to its everydayness, and this contribution shows precisely that Islamophobia is everywhere but manifests itself differently in each locality.

During the last two decades, digitization has deeply transformed the ‘infrastructure’ of economic geography: the quantity and variety of available data, the techniques for retrieving and the tools for processing such data, and the practices of academic research. This commentary argues that the digitization process burdens economic geographers with an information overload, which is commonly addressed through various scholarly practices: coordinated research projects, direct technique-based research design, and increasing participation in multidisciplinary research networks. However, both information overload and adaptive practices include a risk of fragmentation of the research community, since only large and/or well-funded universities and research groups may adapt to the new research context depicted by the digitization of the ‘infrastructure’ of economic geography. Mixed methods and methodological polyglossia emerge, then, as a potential fix for pushing research ahead in economic geography.