Control,Historic Pitfalls,and the UK Nuclear Renaissance

In September 2015, the UK government announced that future taxpayers will underwrite the construction of two European-designed nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. Partly financed by Chinese utility companies, this announcement presents a fait accompli with little democratic input. Few, if any, historic lessons evident from previous attempts to manage its nuclear industry appear to have been learnt. This paper discusses the announcement with reference to the governance of the UK’s historic nuclear legacy—specifically dealing with control, stakeholder engagement, and transparency—and its implications for a nuclear renaissance.     

Book reviews

Improving the quality of public participation in council decision making continues to be a key goal of local government 'modernisation'. Different rationales for this have been advanced, including consumerist aims of service improvement, participation as an important value in itself, and participation as a survival strategy for local government. Based on surveys of, and interviews with, councillors and senior officers in Scottish local government, this article explores the ways in which concepts of 'consumerism' and 'citizenship' inform councils' approaches to public participation.     

Conventional Politics for Unconventional Drilling? Lessons from Pennsylvania's Early Move into Fracking Policy Development

The emergence of hydraulic fracturing techniques is generating a dramatic expansion of the development of domestic natural gas resources in the United States and abroad. Fracking also poses a series of environmental protection challenges that cut across traditional medium and program boundaries. Formal constraints on federal government engagement thus far devolve considerable latitude to individual states for policy development. This provides an important test of whether recent scholarly emphasis on highly innovative state environmental and energy policies can be extended to this burgeoning area. Pennsylvania has moved to the epicenter of the fracking revolution, reflecting its vast Marcellus Shale resource and far‐reaching 2012 legislation. This article examines the Pennsylvania case and notes that the state's emerging policy appears designed to maximize resource extraction while downplaying environmental considerations. The case analysis generates questions as to whether this experience constitutes an influential state early mover that is likely to diffuse widely or is instead an aberration in a rapidly diversifying state policy development process.     

Non‐fiction reviews

Behind the Wall: a journey through China by Colin Thubron, London: Penguin. 1988. 308pp. £4.99pb

Riding the Iron Rooster: by train through China by Paul Theroux, London: Penguin. 1989. 512pp. £4.99pb

Lords of Poverty: the free‐wheeling lifestyles, power, prestige and corruption of the multi‐billion dollar aid business by Graham Hancock, London: Macmillan. 1989. 234pp. £14.95hb

Does Aid Work in India? by Michael Lipton and John Toye, London: Routledge. 1989. 276pp. £35.00hb

The Fortunate Isles: a study in African transformation by Basil Davidson, London: Hutchinson. 1989. 221pp. £7.95pb

Modernising Super‐Exploitation: restructuring South African agriculture. Tessa Marcus, London: Zed. 1989. 207pp. £32.95hb/£12.95pb

Facing the Storm: portraits of black lives in rural South Africa by Tim Keegan, London: Zed. 1988. 170pp. £22.95hb/£6.95pb

Banking on Apartheid: the financial links report. Intergovernmental Group of Commonwealth Ministers, London: James Currey. 1989. 94pp. £4.95pb

South Africa: the sanctions mission by James Mutambirwa, London: Zed. 1989. 135pp. £6.95pb

Sanctions against Apartheid. Edited by Mark Orkin, London: Catholic Institute for International Relations. 1989. 328pp. £4.95pb

South Africa: the sanctions report. Intergovernmental Group of Commonwealth Ministers, London: Penguin. 1989. 273pp. £4.99pb

Contemporary West African States. Donal B Cruise O'Brien, John Dunn and Richard Rathbone, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. £30.00hb/£9.95pb

Power, Class and Foreign Capital in Egypt: the rise of the new bourgeoisie. Malak Zaalouk, London: Zed. 1989. 178pp. £29.95hb/£8.95pb

Pity the Nation: Lebanon at war by Robert Fisk, London: André Deutsch. 1990. 662pp. £17.95hb

Colombia: inside the labyrinth by Jenny Pearce, London: Latin American Bureau. 1990. 312pp. £18.99hb/£8.99pb

The Brazilian Economy: growth and development (third edition) by Werner Baer, New York: Praeger. 1989. 432pp. £47.30hb/£17.50pb

Samora Machel: a biography by Iain Christie, London: Zed Press. 1989. 181pp. £26.95hb/£7.95pb

A Future Preserved: international assistance to refugees by Zefime Zarjevski, Oxford: Pergamon. 1988. 326pp. £42.00hb

Third World Television Access to US Media: distributing television programs from developing countries in US television, new electronic and nontheatrical markets by Claus Mueller New York: Friedrich Naumann Foundation. 1989. 125pp

Power, the Press and the Technology of Freedom by Leonard R Sussman, New York: Freedom House. 1989. 496 pp. $24.95hb

Security and Economy in the Third World by Nicole Ball, London: Adamantine Press. 1988. 432pp. £32.50hb     

Expertise and Bias in Political Communication Networks

Citizens minimize information costs by obtaining political guidance from others who have already assumed the costs of acquiring and processing political information. A problem occurs because ideal informants, typically characterized by the joint presence of political expertise and shared viewpoints, are frequently unavailable or rare within the groups where individuals are located. Hence, individuals must often look beyond their own group boundaries to find such informants. The problem is that obtaining information from individuals located beyond their own groups produces additional costs. Moreover, the availability of ideal informants varies across groups and settings, with the potential to produce (1) context‐dependent patterns of informant centrality, which in turn generate (2) varying levels of polarization among groups and (3) biases in favor of some groups at the expense of others. The article's analysis is based on a series of small‐group experiments, with aggregate implications addressed using a simple agent‐based model.     

An imaginary orthodoxy — a reply to Laurence Harris

The view that world religions contain inherent implications for economic and political action is examined and criticised. Some of the inherent implications attributed to Islam are reviewed. Various authors have attributed contradictory implications to Islamic doctrines. This is because they have referred to different parts and aspects of Islamic religion and society, which like all other complex religions and civilisations have manifested a great variety of forms. The historical development of Islam is divided into three stages and these are in turn related to the economic and political processes basic to all pre-capitalist empires. Patterns of economic and political activism are related to the conditions prevailing at the different stages and to the religious formations within Islam. In particular, it is argued that the failure of the bourgeoisie of Muslim cities to achieve political autonomy and dominance (in contrast to their Western European counterparts) is not a consequence of religious attitudes favouring passivity, but results from the position of these classes in relation to the State and the dominant military classes.     

The anti-political economy

This paper develops Michel Callon's analysis of the technological economy in two ways. First, the paper is concerned with the way that political activity is framed through the use of a variety of technical devices. Arguing against the view that politics can be located in all forms of social and economic activity, the paper suggests that politics should be regarded as a rather specialist activity that is often directed towards 'anti-political' ends. Second, through a discussion of what the paper terms 'the fragility of metrological regimes' and the 'inventiveness of measurement', the paper argues that measurement and calculation can have the effect of disrupting the frame of politics, and creating a conduit for the cross-contamination of the economic and the political.