Path dependency relies upon historicity and context to understand how institutions sustain themselves through time and are compelled to change at critical junctures. Some consider this approach as being deterministic, focused on external shocks to institutions and better at explaining stability rather than change. Others consider that there is also agency in institutional change, that actors may seize upon opportunities within institutions to find novel solutions to new challenges, or that a succession of incremental changes may fundamentally alter institutions without any external shock. We understand language regimes as being path dependent, while accepting that various actors may work within the regime to bring forth incremental changes in language policies. These changes may occur through various policy processes rather than through major disruptions. The impetus for this process may come from within the institutions, where state actors may try to adjust policies to a new context, or from language groups who express dissatisfaction towards the regime and mobilize to demand change. The chapter first discusses the possibility that language regime can change; second, it draws upon the institutional literature to describe how a language regime may change; third, it uses the case of French in Ontario to illustrate this process.

The concluding chapter identifies three broad contributions of the book: explaining the choices made by states about language; offering explicit historical institutionalist accounts of the politics of language by centering the analysis on the state and using notions of legacies, critical juncture, path dependency, layering, conversion, and drift, among others; and, the further development, leveraging, and testing of the concept of state traditions as a theoretical and analytical focus for explaining language policy. The chapter also synthesizes the important points coming out of the case studies drawn from a multiplicity of contexts, namely that processes of state-making and state-building are central in forging the state traditions that steer linguistic policies towards specific developmental paths; that the specific nature and configuration of political institutions within a state, not only at founding but also as it evolves over time when adjusting to changing societal dynamics and circumstances, heavily condition the choices states make about language; and that political ideas and norms are central to state traditions since they tend to structure both political and policy development by conditioning the choices of political actors, pushing societies into specific paths of linguistic choices at the expense of others.

The conclusion outlines continuity and change over the longue durée, whereby continuities outweigh changes.

This chapter presents innovation pathways for urban nature and nature-based solutions that are appearing in cities. Innovation pathways are journeys that involve key drivers, decision-making junctures, agents, and opportunities. The chapter provides a typology of nature-based innovations and unpacks the underlying conditions enabling and constraining the mainstreaming of these innovations through the nature-based solutions innovation system framework. It also discusses localised innovation processes. The chapter provides potential explanations for path dependencies through urban development regimes that enable or constrain these initiatives and systems. From these three sets of dynamics, the chapter aims to provide an understanding about what shapes the pathways through which urban nature and nature-based innovations emerge and open the gateway to potential intervention points towards sustainability. The chapter presents recent innovation pathways for urban nature through case studies from Leidsche Rijn water system in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Little France Park in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, to explore the interconnections between nature, innovation and urban sustainability that indicate the emergence of a global agenda.

Agape-justice conflicts can arise from unattended past wrongs and previous disequilibria in socioeconomic homeostasis. We see this both in theory and in practice. This is sometimes called “prior-fault” moral dilemmas. There is an important time- and place-utility to the claims of justice and agape. These dues have multiple dimensions that must be satisfied simultaneously: giving the right claim, the right amount, at the right time, to the right recipient, from the right payer, at the right place, and in the right manner. Deficiencies in any of these contribute to disequilibria in the delicate socioeconomic homeostasis.

Patronage is present in the Asian countries examined in this collection. Several factors influence the extent and type of patronage. More institutionalised or stable party systems may be more effective in organising patronage on a partisan basis. If social structure is a strong influencing factor on patronage, then one would expect to see country studies identifying loyalty to clan, tribe or ethnic group. In fact, few countries claimed social structure as the dominant mode of patronage. We anticipated that political regime types were important in explaining patronage. The evidence across Asian countries is somewhat nuanced. Appointees in highly developed countries are more likely to be chosen for their public policy expertise than political loyalty. The evidence of the link between path dependency and political patronage is mixed. These studies of patronage in a range of Asian countries demonstrate both similarities and differences in how these appointments are used within governments. Although some countries attempt to disguise the existence of patronage, it does exist in some form. Despite its ubiquity, patronage manifests itself in different forms, and to differing degrees.

This chapter argues for a concept of ’roundabout reasoning’ as a useful tool for comparative legal studies for the movement and adaptation of legal objects, in understanding domestic law, and in critiquing legal development. Roundabout reasoning is defined as a process to resolve potential conflict between two or more objects by (a) a simple method of sequencing their consideration; (b) where actors apply it autonomously; and (c) consideration takes place through a neutral third space without reference to their earlier state.

This is a book about state institutions, political ideology, and the patterns of interaction between the two. It argues, first and foremost, that ideological belief systems imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final two centuries of China’s imperial history. These ideological constraints explain many of the Qing Dynasty’s unique fiscal weaknesses, which eventually had ruinous sociopolitical and economic consequences. Scholars of economic and institutional history have, for the past several decades, distanced themselves from cultural and ideological analysis, but some core features of late imperial Chinese fiscal history cannot be plausibly explained without it. The challenge here is to reintroduce ideology in such a way that makes sense of the Qing’s political and intellectual idiosyncrasies, relative to both other Chinese dynasties and other early modern Eurasian regimes, while also fluidly interacting with the numerous nonideological forces at work in its fiscal politics and institutions.

Chapter 6 takes the narrative from the Taiping Rebellion and its aftermath to the end of the dynasty. By the mid-nineteenth century, the traditional moral consensus that state taxation was inherently wrong had largely crumbled, and many of the most prominent statesmen in the country now openly embraced a new, pro-government investment mode of thinking. Nonagricultural taxes almost immediately began to expand rapidly once the Taiping Rebellion flared up in 1851, and continued to rise after it had been put down, despite the significant amount of political controversy and opposition that this generated throughout the later nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the “realist” assumption that the peasantry would not tolerate higher agricultural tax quotas remained firmly entrenched, unaffected - and even strengthened - by Taiping-era socioeconomic crises. Provincial land surveying made an institutional comeback in the late nineteenth century, but not until the Qing Court faced a complete fiscal collapse in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901) did it finally throw caution to the wind and begin to systemically experiment with higher agricultural tax quotas. To the surprise of many contemporaries, these experiments were largely successful, and while they came much too late to save the Qing from political collapse, they nonetheless laid the intellectual and political foundations for a more robust tax regime in the Republican era and the People’s Republic.

Meant for public health professionals, the Chapter explains what is meant by political economy and its relevance to health, why structural reforms in health are frequently influenced and obstructed by political considerations, how political expediency influences priority setting decisions in health that are frequently related to allocation of resources, and what measures can be taken to minimize political obstacles and barriers in favour of evidence-informed decisions. Political economy of health, as a field of study, grew rapidly in the 1970s that sought to explain the disparities in health care access and the socioeconomic differential in health status across society. Health system development, reform and transformation is a social and political intervention. Political economy analysis (PEA) is central to the successful formulation of health policies and plans and for ensuring their effective implementation. PEA can help to identify potential barriers and facilitators for policy and system change. PEA can help to identify potential barriers and facilitators for policy and system change.

There is nowadays no shortage of books on the Arctic – and this is the last chapter of yet another one. What is different at the end of the read? To answer that question, let me start with a reflection on the understanding we had when we embarked upon writing this book. Despite the rich diversity of publications on the topic, it is possible to discern a few major lines of analysis in the growing body of literature on contemporary Arctic change. One such approach consists of attempts to map and take stock of state-of-the-art knowledge on multiple dimensions of environment, climate, and social conditions in the region. In this category we find the rising genre of “assessments,” many issued by the Arctic Council, of for example: biodiversity, pollution, human health, snow and ice, climate adaptation, impacts of climate change, and a range of other topics. The Arctic Human Development Reports (Einarsson et al., 2004; Fondahl & Larsen, 2014) also belong here, typically broad, multi-authored, anchored in new research, and accessible for wider policy and professional audiences. An attempt to synthesize this broad strand of knowledge was the Arctic Resilience Report (Carson & Peterson, 2016). It compiled an impressive amount of data from many knowledge areas and established better understanding of complex relationships but had less to say about how to interpret this new knowledge and how to use it to address the challenges.

Resource extraction has grown to global significance as part of a particular version of industrial modernity. This modernity emerged with the industrial revolution, accelerated dramatically during the twentieth century, and is now changing rapidly. The fossil fuel-driven world as we know it is questioned and in many parts of the world already taking a downturn. Resource extraction modernity came with a particular kind of societies, based on values linked to gender-, ethnic- and social hierarchy and with largely unsustainable practices. As this modernity is challenged, political and cultural tensions have grown around extractive industries that go far beyond those we saw in the past captured in concepts such as preservation and conservation. To make sense of these comprehensive changes the chapter unites two key concepts: the Anthropocene and the Planetary Mine that together shape the new extractivist paradigm. The Anthropocene speaks to the profound geo-anthropological transformation of the human-earth relationship. The Planetary Mine brings out the interconnected global character of contemporary resource extractivism of which Arctic mining is a significant part.

This first concluding chapter discusses the ways that social science literature has analyzed the legacies of colonial rule, and argues that colonial state-building may represent a more fruitful approach to analyzing complex regimes and their long-term consequences. It presents a discussion of the logic of historical legacies in relation to the comparative-historical framework of critical junctures and path dependency. It then discusses the drawbacks to dominant approaches that focus on causal inference in assessing colonial legacies.