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This paper aims to develop a cross-border regional brand management model to help enhance cooperation for developing such localities. It analyzed its applicability in the Brazil–Argentina and Italy–Austria cross-border regions comprising several cities.

A systematic literature review was conducted to obtain a theoretical basis and select elements for creating the cross-border regional brand management (CRBM) model. To apply the model, in-depth interviews were conducted with 19 specialists of different nationalities and distinct expertise on cross-border governance and regional branding. In addition, to validate the proposed model, a focus group was carried out, and specialists were consulted using forms, providing 22 additional opinions.

The results show good managerial practices and gaps that must be overcome to create and manage the brands from the two regions analyzed.

The theoretical contributions consist in extending the literature in place branding by presenting the first CRBM model and the conceptual explanation of each of the model's elements.

The study's practical implications occur through the suggestion of good management practices for the studied localities arising from the applicability of the CRBM model. Furthermore, it is expected that the model developed can be applied in other locations, bringing practical contributions to the management and creation of cross-border regional brands in other countries.

This study presents the first CRBM model and its applicability to two cross-border regions.

Since the publication of the 1987 Brundtland Report, discussions about sustainable development have been nothing short of a buzz among politicians and academics. This chapter takes stock of an emerging strand of the sustainable city literature that recognizes local political dynamics, conflicts of interest, and power struggles.

The review is organized into three sections. The first section reviews how past studies have utilized sustainable urban development as an opportunity for advancing theories of urban politics, highlighting recent developments in the growth machine, regulatory state, and risk society theses. The second section examines a range of studies that place the questions of scale, unit, and boundary at the center of inquiry. The third section draws together a body of research that interrogates different meanings of sustainability.

The first section discusses the extent to which social and political processes in the sustainability age exhibit a pattern consistent with established theoretical accounts. The second section focuses on studies that address how urban sustainable development has brought challenges to existing configurations of spatial relations. These studies pose important methodological and epistemological questions for studying environmental politics. In the third section, the focus is placed on political implications of urban sustainable development, which is subject to multiple interpretations.

This chapter ends with a review of an emerging thesis – strategic urbanism, which draws attention to the patterns of change in urban politics. Much of the contributions to this thesis are based on urban sustainability politics in recent years.

This paper aims to propose an analytical framework in which to study ambidexterity in the management of policy networks. The paper is inspired by the concept of organizational ambidexterity in the public sector (Smith and Umans, 2015). By focusing on policy networks fostered by public administration with the aim of supporting small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) innovation, the paper elaborates on the links between firm innovation and performance and regional development. The cases analyzed are policy networks fostered by two publicly owned county development agencies in the Basque Country (Spain). An analytical framework emerges from bridging the gap between theory and practice. By understanding ambidexterity as a dynamic capability, the authors found that key ambidexterity drivers are related to network features (motivation to balance exploration and exploitation and diversity in terms of participants) and the individual feature of diversity within the network management group. However, other individual characteristics (leadership style) and territorial features (local institutional capacity) did not provide conclusive insights, calling for a deeper analysis and complex models to capture specific nuances.

The method used in the empirical part of the paper is the case study, as it considers the contextual conditions pertaining to a phenomenon (Yin, 2009) and helps understand present dynamics in specific contexts (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2009). Flyvbjerg (2006) examines common misunderstandings about case studies to conclude that social science may be strengthened by the execution of greater number of good case studies. Following his arguments, the authors consider that practical knowledge is also valuable together with theory, that is why the framework is not derived exclusively form theory but from the interaction and mutual influence of theory and practice.

The case studies lead to a discussion on the effect of network, territorial and individual characteristics (including management/facilitation modes) on network outcomes, including innovation performance of firms and network sustainability. Additionally, these cases show the importance of different factors as necessary conditions and key discriminants when supporting ambidextrous networks. The case analysis and the integration of the theory in this analysis allow observing the evolution of both networks, developing some conclusions on the core factors that influenced these trajectories, thus proposing an analytical framework. Specifically, it can be seen that some of the factors conditioned the ambidextrous strategy of the network.

The main implication of the paper in practice is that the concept of ambidexterity and the framework developed to understand some of its features are a useful tool to diagnose policy networks. The impact in society inspired in this implication is that authors, through the discussion workshops mentioned in the methodology section, have helped the community of policy network managers in Gipuzkoa reflect and improve their strategies and consider the potential of not exclusively focusing on exploration or exploitation. Consequently, the impact on society, in this case on policy networks in the region, has gone beyond the cases studied.

The paper proposes the concept of ambidexterity as one that helps analyze the ability of policy networks to foster SMEs innovation. Managerial literature has extensively analyzed the importance of modes to foster ambidexterity within organizations (Gibson and Birkenshaw, 2004; He and Wong, 2004; Levinthal and March, 1993; Lubatkin et al., 2006) and also its individual dimension (Volery et al., 2015). Managerial focus on policy networks and its link to organizational ambidexterity thus remain understudied. Although private sector literature has explored both concepts, the relation between them has not been analyzed (Smith and Umans, 2015).

Responding to the Supreme Court’s decision in R (on the application of Mott) v. Environment Agency, the purpose of this study is to explore the interface between property, environment and human rights. It examines the space within human rights jurisprudence for a richer notion of property that can accommodate social and environmental obligation and non-anthropocentric values.

In this study, a theoretical lens is applied to human rights doctrine. A central question is the extent to which there is room within the discourse on Article 1 of Protocol 1 (A1P1) to the European Convention on Human Rights for a more relational and ecocentric approach. The paper engages with the jurisprudence of the UK courts and that of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as the works of scholars such as Jennifer Nedelsky and Nicole Graham.

It is concluded that although the judgment in Mott demonstrates the potential for A1P1 to function as a means for rights-holders to obtain a voice in environmental decision-making processes, it highlights the tendency of property to preserve existing structures and arrangements. When assessing whether an individual is asked to bear an excessive burden, great weight was given in Mott to values associated with livelihood. What did not feature in the (brief) judgment was the consideration of the ecological context in which Mr Mott’s rights were embedded and the extent to which this context might have inherently restricted his ability to enjoy his property. The dispute demonstrates the limitations of existing property institutions and discourses in managing ecological conflict and fostering positive relationships and management practices.

This study contributes to the doctrinal literature on A1P1, providing a new perspective on the role of human rights jurisprudence in managing environmental conflict. It is original in its examination of human rights discourse in light of relational and ecocentric theories of property, providing a critique of existing values and paradigms. Evaluating the doctrinal reasoning in Mott with reference to this theoretical framework, it provides fresh insight into the limitations of the Supreme Court’s approach. It points to the need for more explicit incorporation of environmental values and contexts in human rights reasoning.

Climate change poses serious challenges to existing ecosystem governance systems due to the emerging issues that it presents. The chapter discusses two main characteristics of ecosystem governance (i.e., adaptive and collaborative) in the context of a changing climate. It examines the issues to be addressed in the review of governance systems such as ecosystem degradation, adaptation to climate change, and institutionalization of governance structures. It reiterates the importance of considering the consequences of climate change to the ecosystem, economy, and human well-being toward better ecosystem governance.

Public administration has struggled to develop effective practices for fostering just and sustainable responses to social, economic, and environmental crises. In this chapter, we argue that radically democratic social movements demonstrate the potential the ideal-type of Integrative Governance holds for achieving the collaborative advantage that has remained elusive to those who study and utilize traditional governance networks. Drawing from myriad studies of social movements, we demonstrate how particular social movements prefigure the philosophy and practices of this approach. Herein we focus on movements’ ethical stance of Stewardship, politics of Radical Democracy, epistemological use of Integral Knowing, and administrative practice of Facilitative Coordination, emphasizing how they use information communication technology and one-to-one organizing tactics. These practices enable social movements to integrate across the domains of sustainability and translate radically democratic modes of association from micro- to macro-scale. Thus, they shift attention from network structures, the main focus of the governance literature, to power dynamics. These movements constitute an interconnected global phenomenon, fostering solidarity across difference and prefiguring a transformation of the global political economy. Therefore, they are nascent exemplars of Integrative Governance, a more just and effective approach to global governance.

Drawing on assemblage theory (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006), this conceptual chapter seeks to provide an analytical lens for examining the power and capacity of Big Data analytics to exercise territorializing and deterritorializing effects on compound polities and supranational organizations. More specifically, the modern massive agglomeration of data streams and the accelerated computational power available to sort and channel them in effecting actions, decisions, and reconfigurations in contemporary assemblages, necessitate new exploratory tools to examine the impact of such trends on educational phenomena from a comparative perspective. In the first part, the chapter builds an analytical instrumentarium useful in theoretically elucidating the effects of Big Data on complex assemblages and serves as a methodological extension in investigating the ramifications of these effects on educational systems, spaces, and policyscapes. The second part sets out to illustrate how assemblage theory can explain the tension between the formal use of large official statistical data sets as a type of “regulated” Big Data, and the informal use of social media, as a type of “unregulated” Big Data, to construct or deconstruct, respectively, interlacing/interlocking components of assemblages, such as supranational organizations or compound polities. The European Union (EU) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are taken as examples of complex assemblages in which the long-standing utilization of EU’s Eurostat and CARICOM’s Regional Statistical Database have served as territorializing forces in consolidating policy logics and in legitimizing decision-making at the supranational level, while the emergence of “loose” social networking technologies appears to have deterritorializing effects when employed deliberately to delegitimize or subvert socio-political processes across supranational polities.

This paper introduces the state of informal settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean, and it explores potential relationships between informal settlements and national policies on urban development and disaster risk reduction, especially on how risk governance and disaster resilience are conceived and practiced by governments.

17 Habitat III National Reports issued during the preparatory process toward the New Urban Agenda in 2016 are analyzed using statistics and qualitative methods. Some quantitative variables, such as access to drinking water and sewerage in the region, are combined with qualitative data from references to the Sendai Framework and national urban policies in the mentioned reports. Countries in the study include Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay.

Results show that the situation of informal settlements in the region is complex and presents two different realities that coexist: one group of countries in which provision of basic urban services poses great challenges for a significant proportion of the urban population, while the other group in which urban informality and precariousness persists despite better statistics. Risk governance and disaster resilience principles are scarcely articulated in existing urban development discourses in the region.

The preparatory process toward the New Urban Agenda allowed to conduct an original updated cross-country analysis and to identify cross-cutting issues on informality, risk reduction, and urban development in the region.

In the era of financial capitalism, how to manage and hold global corporations accountable has become too multifarious a topic for a solitary focus of one theme, to sufficiently outline the whole gamut and implications of their activities. Capitalism is characterized by several well-organized antinomies and contrasts, with reflections of critical dualities that bear a resemblance to the primeval paradoxes of Hellenic philosophy. The challenge of governance of capitalism to be effectual entails breaking out of the entrenched precincts of habitual academic silos. Various standpoints while reasonably informative falls short to explain fully the complex interlinkages between the concept of global governance and the state’s capacity to put into effect its will on corporate power.

Spotlighting on assessing the praxis of political economy at global and national level and the corporate reality, this chapter aims to provide a renewed thrust for the focused recalibration of global regulatory regime. In this chapter, the inquiries take the regulation as the main explanandum for elucidation of the shifting governance framework.