The Đurđevac Sands constitute a wide area of small-scale dune relief in the Podravina (NE Croatia), located along the central part of the southern Drava River valley. Even though it has been the subject of earlier investigations, the timing and characteristics of aeolian activity and pedogenesis remain unclear. In this study, field investigations and laboratory methods are combined to gather information on past aeolian systems in the southern part of the Pannonian Basin. The results indicate that weak soil formation during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial stabilized the dunes after the first episode of aeolian activity that took place since ca. 18 ka. The source material for dune building is thought to be fluvial sand from the Drava River, which was blown from exposed terraces. During the Younger Dryas and/or Early Holocene, a new phase of aeolian activity is recorded, with material showing stronger evidence of weathering compared to the underlying aeolian material. Finally, during the Mid and/or Late Holocene, dunes were overbuilt once again with fresh unweathered sand. In general, these new findings obtained from the Đurđevac Sands area correlate rather well with other regions in the Pannonian Basin, in terms of the timing and characteristics of soil formation and aeolian activity.

Environmental governance, often characterized as a tug-of-war between central ambitions and local reluctance, provides a valuable lens for examining the dynamics of China’s central–local relations and their impact on policy processes, enhancing our understanding of both the changes and continuities of the Xi Jinping era. By analysing the eco-transformation of waste management through the framework of political steering theory, this article presents a nuanced avoidance strategy used by local governments, which we term minimum compliance. This strategy allows local authorities to cope with and sidestep centrally mandated policies while avoiding the consequences of policy failure. This study enriches the discourse on China’s central–local relations by exploring why top-level design has not reduced policy implementation deviations. It also highlights how local governments in the Xi era evade policy responsibilities in their daily operations and hedge against political pressure.

This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others represent something new, being responses to novel twenty-first-century anxieties and imperatives of nation-building, development, and the place of humanities knowledge in those aspirations. Unlike old conceptions of instrumentality, this new turn signals a more explicit agenda of problem-solving through historical research. It also entails a rather formulaic embrace of proposals for solutions to problems identified in or through historical research.

In China’s pastoral regions, both formal and informal rules are embedded in society and are continually negotiated and reassembled according to social, cultural and political contexts. In particular, the de facto rules governing rangeland use and access are much more intricate and dynamic than de jure property rights as set forth by statutory law. Through the lens of legal pluralism, this article examines the multiplicity of customary practices in Saga, a pastoral village in Amdo Tibet, where pastoralists develop rangeland practices in multiple contexts to manoeuvre in their struggle for inclusion in wealth building and the right to access rangeland and natural resources. Through three cases of customary practices – grazing bans, pasture patrols and communal summer grazing – this research demonstrates how pastoralists interpret and tailor rangeland governance to meet their expectations. A plural context-based hybrid rangeland governance is visible in Saga, where in response to changing de jure rules, de facto rules are deeply rooted in social, cultural and emotional dimensions. Rather than becoming fixed, de facto rules and practices are always evolving in response to the local context where multiple types of de jure rules apply.

Independent Christian Churches were an important aspect of African anticolonial activism, but the political afterlives of these movements in the immediate postcolonial period have been broadly overlooked. This article studies the African Independent Pentecostal Church, focusing on its entanglement with the politics of reconciliation and state-building in a decolonising Kenya. During the 1950s Mau Mau uprising, the church lost its entire portfolio of land, churches, and schools. The article explores how church adherents sought to re-establish themselves on these holdings. These contests reveal that churches were political agents engaged in debates about the boundaries of postcolonial political community and the nature of post-conflict reconciliation. Churches’ roles as landowners and education providers meant denominational rivalries masked political struggles over justice for past violations. Embedded in intra-ethnic conflicts, churches negotiated with elites seeking to establish ethnic constituencies. Through this conflict and compromise, the brokered nature of the postcolonial nation-building project is revealed.

The results of a ground-penetrating radar survey and multiproxy studies of the sediment cores collected from two lakes in the Valdai Highlands (East European Plain) provide new insights into the late glacial and Holocene environmental history of the region situated in the marginal zone of the last Scandinavian ice sheet. The cores were analyzed for organic carbon and nitrogen content, as well as for pollen and diatoms. The chronology of the cores is based on radiocarbon dates and pollen-based stratigraphy. The studied records document that vast dead ice masses and associated ice-dammed lakes existed in the Valdai Highlands area until ∼14 cal ka BP. Open tundra-steppe communities dominated the study area during the Oldest Dryas, Bølling, and Older Dryas (between ca. 17 and 14 cal ka BP), but dwarf birch (Betula nana), shrub alder (Alnus fruticosa), and willow (Salix) were also common. Scots pine forest (Pinus sylvestris) became common for a short interval during the Bølling warming (ca. 14.9 and 14.4 cal ka BP). The appearance of spruce (Picea) forest in the landscape occurred in the beginning of the Allerød warming (∼14 cal ka BP), but the open steppe-like plant communities remained common until the onset of the Holocene. The modern lake systems emerged at ∼10 cal ka BP, marked by an onset of organic-type sedimentation and the appearance of modern-type forests. The Mid-Holocene (∼8–4 cal ka BP) was the warmest time, as documented by the maximal distribution of temperate and broadleaved taxa in the region. The onset of agricultural land use and simultaneous trend of increasing lake trophic state and increasing paludification in the area is recorded at ∼2.5 cal ka BP.

How do local officials in China initiate and sustain policy experiments within a bureaucratic system that often obstructs innovation? This article examines local policy experimentation through the lens of bureaucratic power networks, identifying three key challenges: agenda-setting challenges related to superiors, coordination challenges involving peers and implementation challenges concerning subordinates. When formal power networks fail, entrepreneurial officials develop informal interpersonal networks, positioning themselves as “uninvited advisors” to superiors, “rhetorical allies” to peers and “supportive mentors” to subordinates. Using the case of “police–business cooperation” in Shanghai, the study reveals how the committee on comprehensive management of public security mobilized property management companies to maintain social stability. This article contributes to research on policy experimentation by situating experiments within bureaucratic power dynamics and highlighting the role of informal networks in overcoming institutional barriers. It also reveals the mechanisms by which the Party assigns social control tasks to commercial entities.