Publications

This paper examines the local politics through which the reconstitution of rural localities under globalization is advanced and contested, with particular reference to the impact of international amenity migration. It contends that as globalization proceeds not by domination but by hybridization and negotiation, local politics is critical as the sphere in which the outcomes of…

This paper explores the issue salience of social welfare for disabled people in electoral politics with reference to party manifestos in Westminster and regional elections in the UK. Innovative aspects include mixed methods analysis of multi-tier elections on a cross-cutting issue. The findings reveal an initial post-war clinical-medical approach to welfare and the subsequent emergence…

In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members’ situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a…

There is an increasing interest in the use of IT-based tools to encourage public participation in environmental decision making. Typically, this has involved the development of (predominantly prototype) systems applied in workshop scenarios with those stakeholders with an immediate interest in the planning issue in hand. Increasingly, however, the Internet is being used to explore…

The geography of rural Wales is characterized by the prominence of small market towns. With no town or city with a population above 20,000 people between Swansea and Wrexham, and with a rugged terrain and poor transport infrastructure, the centres of commerce and administration in rural Wales have historically been small market towns, some of…

The enlargement of the European Union (EU) into central and eastern Europe in May 2004 extended labour mobility to millions of new citizens. As one of the few countries to give citizens of the ‘accession states’ unrestricted access to its labour market, Britain became a favoured destination for migrant workers from the new EU members,…

In this paper we examine the contested character of local civil society in rural North West Wales. Recent years have seen an increasing research and policy interest in the nature of civil society activity at the local level. In contributing to this, we argue that greater attention be paid to how relationships between civil society…

This evidence specifically relates to the Committee’s work in relation to the reviews of polling places. It urges the Committee to consider not simply the important issue of accessibility in terms of physical access to the polling station by disabled people but also accessibility in terms of distance to travel by all electors in a…

The constitutional reform programme pursued by the Labour Government following the 1997 General Election fundamentally recast territorial politics and administration in the United Kingdom. The introduction of devolved institutions across the UK challenged the already somewhat over-stated and loosely defined myth of the ‘unitary state paradigm’ and reinvigorated debates regarding the extent to which the…