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This chapter posits an overlapping sense of alienation among Southern Protestants and Irish intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s, as both groups found themselves out of step with the pieties of the Catholic nationalist culture predominant at the time. It identifies secular Catholic intellectuals Seán O'Faoláin and Owen Sheehy Skeffington as central figures in Irish society and the importance of the journal The Bell. It evaluates Butler's attempts to frame his notions of communal belonging in philosophical terms, placing his writings in the context of his own wide reading, the ideas of George W. Russell, and the influence of Catholic Vocationalism in 1930s Ireland. It introduces his fascination with various social utopian experiments from history, analyses his attitude to his own Christian inheritance, and evaluates his essentially secular brand of Protestantism. It notes the evolution of traditionally Protestant institutions such as the Irish Times and Trinity College Dublin in accommodating social change.

The introductory chapter introduces the reader to the concept of localism in both broadcast policy and critical theory. It also provides a brief historical overview of local broadcast policy in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, and unpacks the methods and methodologies employed in the research. More specifically, it discusses the value of document analysis and interviews to critical media policy studies, explains critical discourse analysis, and introduces the concept of critical regionalism which will be further explicated in chapter 1. Additionally, the chapter introduces the reader to two terms coined in the book: “the political economy of localism” and “default localism.” The chapter concludes with an outline of the chapters to follow.

In Chapter 6, the case studies are analyzed through the frameworks of critical regionalism and critical political economy. The first section describes how a political economy of localism has come to exist within media policy discourse. This system favors the status quo over alternatives, tethers local media exclusively to specific places, and impedes our ability to think through ways to bridge the spatial and social divides of localism. The second section reintroduces critical regionalism as an approach that tempers this political economy. The chapter argues that while the political economy of localism works to stifle policy alternatives, there are policy windows – “moments of critical regionalism” – that require our attention. The chapter offers a definition of media localism based on critical regionalism and the case studies.

This short chapter provides an introduction to the book. It highlights the emergence of New Localism(s) across Europe and the role of Area-based initiatives as national urban policies for regenerating deprived urban areas. It ends with a short summary of each book chapters.

The chapter investigates and compares manifestations of the New Localism(s) in two European countries that were chosen for this research, England and Germany. It identifies three features that characterise these New Localism(s). By retracing public policy reforms in England and Germany, it shows how principles of New Public Management (NPM) have played a crucial role in both countries for reform initiatives to seek new and alternative delivery mechanisms for local welfare provisions.

This chapter summarises and synthesises the preceding chapters, discussing a series of themes which have emerged. The first is the interaction between the levels of devolution which have been the focus of each chapter, reflecting upon overlaps between them and cumulative impacts of changes to different levels of governance. The second is that Brexit has dominated UK governance to an unhealthy degree, casting a long shadow over other issues, including localism. The third is the impact of ‘austerity’ and the reductions in central and local state spending consequent on it, and the fourth follows – that poorer people are consistently losing out from every round and type of reform. Our conclusion is, therefore, that localism as it has been instantiated in the UK has overall been a regressive force, but that this need not necessarily be the case – whilst we identify few lessons for other places, there is scope to work within and around formal governance frameworks to have a more positive impact.

Chapter 5 chronicles regulatory attempts to bolster local television, particularly local television news, in the US, UK and Canada. It argues that each of these attempts ultimately fell victim to status quo thinking, a reliance on market factors, and a fallback to default localism. The American case study is an analysis of the FCC’s Broadcast Localism Inquiry. The Canadian case study is an evaluation of the Local Programming Improvement Fund, a subsidy to bolster local news amongst television stations. The UK case study is on the Local Digital Television Programme Service, which was an attempt to establish a local television system akin to those in North America in 2013.

This chapter explains how devolution has had a major impact on the role of the Westminster Parliament as an oversight body as well as transforming constitutional accountability at sub-national level by establishing a new democratically elected institutional framework based on a Parliament in Scotland and Assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland. A contrast is drawn between the approach to establishing financial accountability for devolution and for local government. The impact of financial allocation under the Barnett formula is discussed. Finally, it is argued that, although the reforms under the Scotland Act 2012 and Localism Act 2011 seek to establish greater financial accountability, including links between tax and spend in Scotland, the concurrent cuts in public expenditure imposed by central government are likely to undermine fundamental assumptions over the uniform state provision of services throughout the UK.

This Chapter considers how referendums have come to be employed in the UK as an expression of popular sovereignty in the domain of territorial governance. It is pointed out that challenges to constitutional questions of sovereignty depended on having a parliamentary mandate from an elected government but that since the first national referendum in 1975, over membership of the EEC, referendums have been turned to with increasing frequency. The practice relating to changes in the structure of sub-state governance, as part of devolution, regional government, and under the Localism Act 2011, suggest that a convention is emerging which requires the electorate to be consulted directly. However, the record over this period indicates that referendums have not only been used pragmatically but also with a lack of consistency. It is argued that to prevent abuse by government clear rules need to be formulated to determine when constitutional referendums can be held.

Without abandoning the practical idea of farming as a business, the small-scale farmers in this book foster connections between consumer experiences and expectations and farming practices that support their visions of organic. They try to build new, alternative markets to challenge the watering down of “organic” that the full-force entrance of corporate market logics ushered in. However, there are limitations to how sustainable such farming operations can be without further changing the relationships the modern food system is based upon. This chapter begins by recognizing the many limitations of localism, including the potentially neoliberal aspects of such efforts. However, the neoliberal notion that individuals can and should bring forth their own interests and engage in political contestation could (paradoxically) be the very kernel that further popularizes small-scale food production networks that provide safer, more healthful food and a better sense of community than the isolating conventional shopping experience. Finally, the chapter considers how deepening consumer involvement in the process of agriculture, incorporating concerns about social justice into local food systems, and addressing the inefficiencies of decentralized food production could push local agriculture to be even more alternative.

This chapter reviews the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party’s experience in local government in the contemporary era, with a review of the post-1974 period, traditionally viewed as the inception of modern Scottish local government. It also analyses the impact of the Conservative Party over the past 40 years, and then shifts the focus to how Scottish Conservative local government election manifestos and electioneering has changed, looking in particular at the 2017 local government election in Scotland, when the party increased its representation in town halls across the country.

The story of how The Globe (1599) was rebuilt from the reused oak timbers of The Theatre (1576) is well known. Less familiar is the environmental crisis that prompted this thrifty recycling. Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, were in danger of losing The Theatre because the lease had expired. The landlord, Giles Allen, was threatening to pull down the playhouse and put its wood and timber to other uses. The leaseholders, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, got there before him because a clause in the original agreement made them owners of the building on Allen’s land. In the lead-up to their stealthy dismantling of The Theatre on the icy morning of 28 December 1598, when Allen was away celebrating Christmas in the country, each side had been eyeing the valuable timber and wood. Its reuse was the lynchpin of a deal between the Burbages and five actor-sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men, including Shakespeare, for building The Globe: the brothers offered to supply the main materials if the sharers contributed to the lesser expenses of construction and maintenance. The Burbages had spent their savings on building an indoor theatre at Blackfriars two years before. Although it had begun to pay them rent, they could not afford to buy new materials because the price of wood and timber had risen 96 per cent over the quarter century since The Theatre had been built. This inflation was the result of southern English woodlands being deforested. Ancient English woodland and forests had been shrinking throughout the middle ages. By Henry VIII’s time the pace began to accelerate. Worried about timber supplies for shipbuilding, the government took the first steps—largely ineffective—to manage depletions. Climactic and demographic pressures aggravated overexploitation, and by the 1590s caused a fuel crisis in south-east England and the country’s first major environmental controversy. Similar to the threat of warming global temperatures today, the stresses on southern English woodland—at that time the country’s most essential but finite natural resource—reached an ecological turning point. A solution was in the offing, but it was a highly ambivalent one.

Poisoned towns and rivers, species extinctions, and now climate change have confirmed many times over how modern dreams of limitless growth combined with relentless technological exploitation have compromised planetary life at every level. In response to such degradation, the integrity of local place has been a major orientation for environmental ethics and criticism. The origins of localism are conventionally traced to late-eighteenth-and nineteenth-century critiques of urban industrialization, and Romanticism’s corresponding veneration for rural authenticity and wilderness spaces. Mid-twentieth-century environmentalism revived this ‘ethic of proximity’ in denouncing the release of pollutants and carcinogens into local soils, waters, and atmospheres by civil offshoots of military manufacturing and industrial agriculture. Those releases did not stay local, but soon penetrated regional water systems and wind patterns to become worldwide problems. Such networks of devastation continue to grow, especially in developing countries eager to mimic the worst aspects of Western consumer culture. In response to these developments, ecotheorists have partially revised locally focused models of environmental protection. Planetary threats such as rising global temperatures, melting polar ice sheets, and more intense storms have made it imperative to update the famous Sierra Club slogan and to act globally as well as locally. Localism has also been reshaped by conservation biology’s new recognition that geophysical disturbances and organic change are structural features of all healthy ecosystems. Within these more complicated ecological paradigms, the cultivation of relatively balanced and genuinely sustainable local relationships nonetheless remains an important conservationist worldview. In early modern England it was the leading life experience out of which responses to new environmental dangers were conceived. In this chapter I shall discuss Shakespeare’s representations of one of the three most significant of these threats—deforestation—in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The other two, exploitative land-uses and gunpowder militarization, will be the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3 respectively). Early modern English writers and governments treated deforestation as a national problem, even though its impacts were concentrated mainly in the Midlands and the south-east.

Having made jibes at Orlando’s love-verses and drawn defensive reactions from Rosalind, Touchstone gently reproves her by appealing to nature as a third party: ‘You have said; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge’ (3.2.117–18). Thinking ecocritically, we might hear in his advice an anticipation of Aldo Leopold’s landmark book, A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold redefined ecological ethics by reading his local Wisconsin landscape for signs of its biodiversity, whose value he asserted independent of its economic and social utility. He also encouraged readers to think about reciprocity and fairness in their dealings with the environments and resources they share with non-human life. Jaques’s viewpoint in As You Like It is hardly as self-disinterested as that of a forest. Yet he captures the essence of Leopold’s biocentric principles by reminding Oliver that the trees into which he has thoughtlessly, if romantically, carved his verses are entitled to their own physical integrity (3.2.251–52). Leopold’s outlook inspired the later movement, bioregionalism, which looks to identification with a landscape’s terrain, climate, and biota, or collective plant and animal life, as the basis for resistance to environmental damage caused by distant political authorities and transnational economies. In conceiving environments as ‘life-territories’ with natural rights that extend beyond those of human culture, Leopold invited people to imagine cooperative attachments to regional modes of subsistence and dwelling. Arden and surrounding Warwickshire were the life-territory where Shakespeare learned to think bioregionally. Whereas his knowledge of Windsor in Merry Wives came from passing acquaintance, his sensitivity to Arden’s place-attachments was both deeply personal and critically detached, and he integrated both perspectives into As You Like It. Topographic and social contouring of Warwickshire’s historically changing terrains dramatically heightens the visibility of Arden’s early modern bio-relations. I’ll begin exploring these by considering how Shakespeare gave his dramatic adaptation of Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde (1590) a distinctive environmental profile. In doing so, Shakespeare created an ecological meta-commentary on Lodge’s popular forest romance.

The disputed land-uses and cultivation practices represented in As You Like It responded to unprecedented changes in Elizabethan climate, population, and economic relations. Traditional modes of rural dwelling were no longer protected by virtue of their rural isolation or autonomy, but were becoming inescapably tied to national and global orders of competitive growth and resource exploitation. Perhaps the most disruptive of these modernizing turns was the development of gunpowder technologies and the armament industry. As in other western European countries, military culture became ubiquitous in England by the late sixteenth century as a result of innovations in gunpowder weapons and the formation of national armies. During the Middle Ages, low-tech weaponry and feudal mobilization had limited the social and environmental impacts of war. This situation began to change from the fifteenth century onwards with the development of far more deadly cannons, mines, and firearms. Influenced partly by the Erasmian ethics of his Humanist education (like Queen Elizabeth and King James in their attitudes to war), Shakespeare drew attention to gunpowder’s devastating effects on human and non-human animals and their environments in virtually all his history plays and several of his tragedies, even thoughmost of these references were anachronistic. By layering historical and contemporary viewpoints he registered changing material realities and cultural assumptions about the ecology of war: from self-regulating cycles of martial destruction and agrarian regeneration, to incremental technological mastery reliant on ever-increasing resource consumption. Traditional ideas about redeeming war through cultivation are captured by the Virgilian image of beating swords into ploughshares. It suggests that peacetime cultivation will heal wartime damage, and that periods of war and peace routinely alternate. The swordsinto-ploughshares trope also encodes temporal assumptions that the arc of catastrophe, in its political, ecological, and dramatic senses, is limited in scope and ultimately reversible. In this chapter I want to examine the emerging gunpowder regime putting pressure on this paradigm, and replacing it with modern structures of recoiling environmental risk and planetary push-back, represented in Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth respectively.

This chapter examines the court’s decision in the Paulovich case, the implementation of their ruling, and its impact on the application of surname legislation. It demonstrates how, even under the strictures of national dictatorship, local authorities adopted various legal strategies and approaches that affected the experience of local populations, and that periodic violence and overt repression were not the only tools Fascists employed to promote quiescence in the borderland. The Paulovich case served as a precedent in subsequent surname restoration cases, and the chapter shows how the surname campaign and its implementation in the borderland continued to provoke nationalist controversy until the outbreak of the World War II. The chapter reveals rifts between local officials and national authorities, illuminating the tensions that surfaced between officials charged with applying the nationalizing laws and those responsible for overseeing national legal standards and administration.

Chapter 2 examines different manifestations of the local in the name of local consciousness, localism, local identity and local discourse. With reference to Mieke Bal’s “travelling concepts”, the chapter takes a critical look at both the generative and the degenerative moments experienced by Hong Kong’s local as it travels. Referring to the interactions between things, places and bodies in the making of a cultural icon, “local relations” as the key term of the book is coined in this chapter, revealing different degrees of connectivity and affinity between objects (as things and cultural signs), urban dwellers and their different realms of habitation and activities. The chapter furthers to demonstrate how the pluralistic local can be maintained through hybridizing the affinities shared between agencies such as things, places and bodies across different discourses, realities and fields.

This chapter assesses how the record-breakings levels of electoral flux in 2016 may have impacted on attitudes towards representative politics in Ireland. First, it examines voter attitudes to the role of TDs (MPs) in 2016. The Irish tradition of high degrees of localism in representative politics is based on the strong attachment of Irish voters to a constituency orientation from their politicians. The analysis shows that this remains as strong as ever. There are, however, some changes in how voters make contact with their elected representatives – the second theme dealt with in this chapter. The intensity (or degree) of contact is resilient, but its form is shifting to more impersonal or virtual means of contact (especially among younger voters): the days of the ‘weekly clinic’ – that classic mainstay of representative politics in Ireland – may be numbered. Finally, the chapter examines what Irish voters thinks of their politicians overall – this latter theme referencing ongoing international debates about the emergence of populist attitudes. The evidence from the Irish case is a pretty positive one, with many voters indicating a favourable disposition towards their politicians – though this is not universal.