Running the Risks: The Rationalisation of Australia's Water

This article analyses the categories comprising the relationship between productivity and rate-of-return reporting in the context of water infrastructure. It examines the categories and relations comprising rates of return, showing how each can fail to capture real productivity gains. Theoretically, high returns may be obtained despite low real productivity and vice versa. This has implications for 'corporatisation', since the restructuring of Australia's water systems has entrenched rate-of-return reporting as the pre-eminent measure of performance. The problem is, if water's rate-of-return is continually increased without ensuring commensurate real productivity improvements, eventually Australia's water systems must break down. The issue is acute as neither the theory of corporatisation nor the logic of 'economic rationalism' supplies a means for ensuring profitability does not outrun productivity. I conclude the rationalisation of Australia's water has exposed citizens to new, fundamental and otherwise unprotected social, environmental and economic risks.     

Strengthening the ties that bind? An analysis of aboriginal–municipal inter‐governmental agreements in British Columbia

Abstract: Despite a rich and well‐developed literature on Canadian federalism, multilevel governance, and aboriginal–settler relations, scholars have tended to ignore the variety of inter‐governmental agreements that have emerged between aboriginal and municipal governments in Canada. This article examines ninety‐three such agreements to construct a typology of aboriginal–municipal inter‐governmental partnerships in British Columbia. It finds that over time there has been a shift from mundane, service‐provision agreements towards more collaborative, cooperative and sometimes decolonizing, horizontal and multilevel governance partnerships. As a result, the authors suggest that scholars study these agreements to further explain and understand the evolution of aboriginal–settler relations and multilevel governance in Canada.     

Reclassifying Chinese Nationalism: the geopolitik turn

This article assesses the rise of China by exploring a number of recent popular Chinese political texts to go beyond explanations that take the international system as the level of analysis. It proposes that a merging of nationalism and geopolitical thinking is taking place, resulting in the emergence of a new form of nationalism that can be categorised as ‘geopolitik nationalism’ because it deploys many of the themes evident in the political thought of Germany and Japan before the two world wars. By considering the impact of such ideas, it is possible to gain new insights into recent assertive actions in Chinese foreign policy.