Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

WHAT ROLE FOR GOVERNMENT? THE PROMOTION OF CIVIL SOCIETY THROUGH FORESTRY‐RELATED CLIMATE CHANGE INTERVENTIONS IN POST‐CONFLICT NEPAL

This study examines rationales behind the choice of local interlocutors by forestry‐related climate change projects in post‐conflict Nepal. In their stated objectives, all projects claim to involve the government, and most project decision makers are in favor of government involvement, yet project resources overwhelmingly favor civil society institutions. Project decision makers' choices are shaped by a combination of donor conditionalities, contextual constraints, and beliefs about which institutional attributes matter and how to address historical marginalization. The projects' empowerment of civil society sidesteps opportunities to strengthen the local government, which is described as weak, disinterested, and lacking legitimacy owing to the absence of elections due to the unsettled post‐conflict situation. Through the choices made and their justifications, projects and donors further marginalize the local government materially and discursively and thereby entrench its perceived deficiencies. We argue that this privileging of civil society may have implications for government legitimacy and post‐conflict reconstruction and call for donors and the intervening institutions they fund to critically and collectively reassess the role of forestry‐related climate change projects in the larger process of post‐conflict reconstruction in Nepal. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are Women as Likely to Take Risks and Compete? Behavioural Findings from Central Vietnam

Using controlled experiments to compare the risk attitude and willingness to compete of husbands and wives in 500 couples in rural Vietnam, we find that women are more risk averse than men and that, compared to men, women are less likely to choose to compete, irrespective of how likely they are to succeed. Relevant to development programmes concerned with lifting women out of poverty, our findings suggest that women may be more reluctant to adopt new technologies, take out loans, or engage in economic activities that offer higher expected returns, in order to avoid setups that require them to be more competitive or that have less predictable outcomes.     

Modeling the relationship among brownfields,property values,and community revitalization

Abstract

The main focus in redeveloping brownfields is on the most marketable properties, typically found in the healthiest urban neighborhoods. As evidenced by the rapid redevelopment that many communities are experiencing, this approach is helping to return brownfields to productive use. Yet not all brownfields are being cleaned up, nor are there enough resources to do so soon. Thus, from the perspective of community revitalization and of economic justice, we need to ask whether it matters which properties in which neighborhoods are receiving these scarce funds. That is, does the existence of brownfields in a neighborhood affect residential property values and capacity for revitalization?

To answer these questions, we use hedonic modeling to determine the impact of brownfields on property values in Atlanta and Cleveland. Our results suggest that short‐term economic efficiency is neither the most appropriate nor the only criterion on which to base public investment decisions for remediation.     

Eu merger control and the compatibility test:a review of recent developments

The compatibility test contained in Article 2 of the Merger Control Regulation (MCR) is at the very heart of EU merger control, for it determines whether a concentration with a community dimension is deemed compatible or incompatible with the common market. Incompatibility can lead to prohibition of a concentration, although this is rare. The paper reviews the recent developments to the conditions of the test itself as well as the analytical methods employed to determine compatibility. Concerning the former, the new foreseeable dominance interpretation, put forward by the European Commission and made law by the Court of First Instance (CFI), is explored. This new variant of the dominance condition is important on its own right but it is also of major interest because of the explicit legal requirement placed on the Commission to assess the future likelihood of abusive behaviour by the merging parties in its prospective analysis. This is not the case with the original dominance compatibility condition. The unexpected but important clarification by the CFI of the notion of substantial part of the common market, as contained in the express wording of the compatibility test, is also commented upon. Concerning the determination of compatibility, the Commission's controversial employment in certain conglomerate concentrations of the range effects of competitive harm theory is examined, as is the need to take cognisance of merger specific efficiencies when determining if a merger increases societal welfare. The EU is making progress toward such an efficiencies assessment as part of the compatibility determination. EU merger control – and hence the compatibility test – do not exist in a vacuum. The EU has played a major role in shaping the new multilateral architecture and its goal of increasing international convergence in competition matters. This in turn has led the EU to rethink the nature of the compatibility test. For example, it has sought to evaluate the dominance condition of the compatibility test with the substantial lessening of competition (SLC) approach used by some other regulators, like the US. The paper concludes by looking at a fundamental issue that has arisen from recent CFI judgements and the GE/Honeywell merger: the competence of the Commission, or more accurately the Merger Task Force (MTF), to carry out the compatibility determination. Proposals are outlined so as to ensure that the Commission's prospective analysis in a concentration case meets the requisite legal standard. It is essential for this standard to be met if EU merger control is to remain credible. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

EC Merger Control: From Separate Jurisdictional Zones to a Cooperation Based Architecture?

The EC Merger Control Regulation(MCR) established an architecture ofconcentration control based on separate,non-overlapping jurisdictional spheres forMember states and the European Commission, withthe Commission alone having jurisdiction overconcentrations with a competition concern thatpotentially have a Community interest. Therationale is that this will help guarantee thelevel playing field for business and safeguardthe Single Market. This, of course, is verymuch dependant on the architecture working inpractice. The Community Dimension (CD) testsare at the centre of the architecture ofseparate jurisdictional zones, determiningwhich concentrations have a CD and hence aCommunity interest. The paper reveals that thecurrent form-based CD tests are flawed,undermining the effective operation of thearchitecture. It explores three competingproposals put forward to remedy the above flaw:an enhanced role for Article 22 MCR, a singlefine-tuned threshold test and, thirdly, theCommission's multiple notification approach.The paper contends that these proposals aloneare not sufficient to make the architectureeffective. It argues that what is required isan improved CD test applied in conjunction witha harmonised Articles 2 and 9 MCR approach. Inline with the Commission's desire to considerthe long term shape of EC merger control, thepaper concludes by looking at a radicalalternative to the efforts to fine-tune thearchitecture of separate jurisdictionalspheres. By way of stimulating debate, itconsiders an EC merger control based on anetwork of cooperation involving Member states'regulators and the Commission, and with allapplying EC merger law.     

Storytelling and fraught histories: Phila Ndwandwe’s Blue Dress

Twenty years after the final hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, researchers are unearthing and examining the stories, discourses and processes that formed the transition from the apartheid to post-apartheid periods. In this paper, I investigate the story of Phila Ndwandwe, killed by the security police in the late 1980s, whose body was the first to be exhumed by the commission. Ndwandwe’s story has been framed through various narrative devices, most prominently by an artwork by Judith Mason colloquially titled the Blue Dress. Tracing the stories constructed about Ndwandwe, I consider the performative and transformative potentials of storytelling and argue for a commitment to listening that resists mere understanding.