The UK’s desire to prove its international relevance after Brexit, together with the COVID pandemic, produced a unique opportunity: a two-year Presidency of the UN climate talks for the country that has long been the most active in climate change diplomacy. A chance to test a new approach – after thirty years of slow progress, better late than never.

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to interpret and assess two communities of practice: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which frames the problem of global warming, and the Conference of Parties (COP), which meets annually to discuss international society’s response within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Applying the book’s two normative tests – inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgment – the chapter demonstrates how the IPCC maintains epistemic authority by appropriately managing the boundary that separates expert knowledge from non-expert opinion. The analysis of COP operates at a micro level (e.g. how physical space at the Conference is organized) and the macro level (e.g. whether it would be better to organize deliberations on a ‘minilateral’ basis). The chapter notes how this debate has been bypassed by the Paris Agreement and the decision to commit to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emissions reduction. It assesses the consequences of that collective judgement in light of the progress made at the 2021 Glasgow COP. The chapter concludes that the problem should now be framed in terms of states delivering on the commitments they have made, and it considers the usefulness of nationalist dispositions and citizens assemblies in that process.

The UK’s desire to prove its international relevance after Brexit, together with the COVID pandemic, produced a unique opportunity: a two-year Presidency of the UN climate talks for the country that has long been the most active in climate change diplomacy. A chance to test a new approach – after thirty years of slow progress, better late than never.

This chapter examines late twentieth-century trends in city centre management, showing how the models of organising commercial selling space that had been developed within individual shopping complexes came increasingly to be applied to the city centre in its entirety. It considers the impact of a significant national change in planning policy as large, out-of-town shopping centres were allowed to emerge for the first time in Britain in the 1980s. The rise of out-of-town centres intensified the competitive pressures that were already present within the British urban system, forcing towns and cities to push ever harder for new forms of retail development in their own locales. Smaller urban centres were consistently disadvantaged by these dynamics and by the 1990s a narrative of ‘dying’ towns and abandoned high streets had already taken shape. Earlier post-war efforts to adapt waning industrial centres for new, consumer-driven models of growth acquired a renewed urgency and were placed at the centre of the new national policy agendas of ‘urban regeneration’ and ‘renaissance’. The chapter concludes by highlighting the inadequacy of such retail-led regeneration strategies for the most structurally disadvantaged locales.

This chapter examines the curious new landscapes of affluence which were installed in Britain’s towns and cities in the post-war decades. It shows how new shopping spaces were consciously engineered by designers as entertaining spectacles and served as sites in which a new public culture of affluence and acquisition was propagated. I relate this to the powerful political and cultural critiques of new retail environments which have proliferated in literatures on the ‘postmodern’ consumer city. I also stress that, in the 1960s, many public planners felt themselves to be engaged in the production of a new and energising type of civic space in the redeveloped shopping landscape and saw this endeavour in light of contemporary ideas about entitlements to mass leisure. For the more high-minded public planners new retail developments were a means of revitalising public space and public culture through uniting the civic with the commercial realms, and thus reflected the wider mingling of the categories of citizen and consumer, of welfare statehood with affluence. In practice this attempt to harness commercial retail development with an invigorated urban public sphere was inherently unstable and could not be sustained over the longer term.

Chapter 16, ‘Women in the Music Industries: The Art of Juggling’, considers the persistent male-dominated nature of the popular music industry and the space which contemporary FIMAs (Female Independent Music Artists) have carved out within it to sustain portfolio careers. Clare K. Duffin also presents two detailed case studies of Glasgow-based FIMAs, Emma Gillespie and Carol Laula.

This chapter provides three regional case studies during 1945–65. Sheffield, selected for being after Hull the least religious city in the nation, shows the relentless power of an alienating evangelical and Nonconformist culture of the middle classes, which bombarded the working classes with middle-class solutions: teetotalism, Sabbatarianism, few pop music venues and contraceptive advice by middle-class volunteers. The result was, according to an influential interpretation by E. R. Wickham, the Anglican industrial missionary, proletarian and artisan alienation from the churches. Glasgow forms a contrast of the most highly religious industrial city in mainland Britain, but with a popular culture under aggressive licensing control, notably its public houses from which ‘civilising’ games, music, television and attractions for women were banned. Sexual culture was made as difficult as possible. Lastly, the Isle of Lewis shows a puritanical anti-alcoholic culture, based on the most orthodox of Calvinist churches, within which, despite overt conformity, there were notable attempts at popular resistance, including organised lawbreaking.

When and how did the Scottish Enlightenment take shape? What were its major influences - Scottish, English, European and other? Can we account for its unique character? Who were its major players? What did they want and achieve? Answers to these basic questions hinge on the debatable nature of the Scottish Enlightenment. Regardless of where one’s emphases fall or the tenor of the Scottish Enlightenment one sees, there is no single context for it. This chapter explores several which were important for all of them.

The Scottish Enlightenment was situated in a particular geography and climate and within distinct population trends. Patrons were important to it. So, too, were institutional contexts and the wider eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. While Edinburgh was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, Glasgow and Aberdeen provide other and differing contexts.

We find that the contexts shaping the Scottish Enlightenment differed from those elsewhere. Culturally diverse and eager for improvement from the late seventeenth century, by 1800, the Scots could boast of an Enlightenment to which belonged several of the century’s best philosophers and historians, its most accomplished political economist and many notable social thinkers, scientists and medical men, rhetoricians, theologians and artists. Their works circulated widely, engendering debate and excitement in Britain, on the Continent and in America.