Mitigating conflict with collaboration: Reaching negotiated agreement amidst belief divergence in environmental governance

High levels of conflict among coalitions in a policy process are often attributed to belief divergence and may lead to policy gridlock. Thus, reducing belief divergence may facilitate negotiation and open the door for policy change. Beliefs are notoriously difficult to change, however, especially in high-conflict settings. Collaborative governance has been touted as one method for mitigating conflict to a level where negotiation is possible by means including but not limited to belief change. This study investigates the relationship between belief divergence as a driver of policy conflict and collaborative governance as a conflict mitigation tool by analyzing the beliefs of two opposing coalitions as they participate in a decade-long collaborative environmental governance process that ended in negotiated agreement. Using longitudinal survey and interview data, we find that coalitions' beliefs diverge more at a later point in the process, due primarily to the reinforcement and strengthening of one coalition's beliefs; however, we also identify aspects of the collaborative process that helped foster negotiated agreement amidst this growing belief divergence. These findings can inform scholarship on conflict mitigation in environmental governance as well as the design of more effective collaborative processes in high-conflict settings.     

China,the international criminal court,and global governance

ABSTRACT

This article explores the Chinese policies towards the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the context of global governance. Despite China’s fast-growing foreign policy competence, the level of confidence held by China in engaging with global governance systems has not yet fully transmitted to the legal institutions governing human rights issues, and the ICC is such an example. This article examines specific policy concerns of China regarding the ICC in light of China’s engagement with global governance, and some of the traditional concerns that have had an impact on that engagement. It discusses the extent to which these concerns should still be regarded as policy barriers preventing China’s full accession to the ICC in years to come.     

Blueing business as usual in the ocean: Blue economies,oil, and climate justice

Oceans are increasingly looked toward for their contribution to addressing climate change. These so-called ocean-based climate “solutions” often fall under the umbrella of the “blue economy,” a term used to refer to new ways of organizing ocean economies to provide equitable economic and environmental benefits. Yet, thus far the literature exploring blue economies and blue economy governance has largely overlooked or downplayed its equity and justice roots and implications, including how blue economies are embedded in multiple scales of environmental injustices. This is particularly important when blue economies include offshore oil production. The purpose of this paper is to both emphasize the need and provide an approach to incorporate justice and equity—specifically climate justice—into blue economy planning and scholarship. We build on conceptualizations of blue economies as assemblages to draw attention to the global reach of climate impacts associated with oil that are often overlooked or ignored at sites of production and through regional governance. We argue that greenhouse gas emissions from the life cycle of oil should be included in policies and planning (including blue economy planning) at sites of production, but that this must also incorporate underlying power structures that lead to uneven impacts and climate injustice. We look at environmental assessments as a regional governance tool that could be used to shape opportunities and openings to organize blue economies differently. To illustrate these points, we look at how environmental assessments are playing (and could play) a role in enacting and shaping Newfoundland and Labrador's blue economy.     

Invisible radiation reveals who we are as people: environmental complexity,gendered risk,and biopolitics after the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and the subsequent tsunami and release of nuclear contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, is clearly one of the largest disasters of the past century and it has devastated large portions of eastern Japan. In this paper we explore the coping mechanisms of people navigating these landscapes of contamination, as well as examine state policies developed to deal with the disaster. We argue that there has been a significant discrepancy between state policies and the needs of people directly affected by the catastrophe. To more fully examine why this discrepancy exists – and how it is produced – we investigate the complex geographies of contamination and risk near the damaged Fukushima power plant through the conceptual lens of ‘wet ontologies’ coupled with an analysis of state strategies for the governance of the affected populations. In our research we found that Foucauldian theorizations on biopower, neoliberalism and environmental governance can help explain how nuclear power as a social institution can require states to sacrifice the well-being of hundreds of thousands of their citizens in ways that affect people in gendered and age-specific ways.     

From a White Desert to the Largest World Deposit of Lithium: Symbolic Meanings and Materialities of the Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia

The Uyuni salt flat (Salar de Uyuni) in Bolivia possesses the largest lithium deposit in the world. Over the past 40 years, this location has been commodified and radically transformed. This paper examines how a landscape, understood from its material attributes and qualities, shapes and is shaped by social relations unfolding in a process of commodification and mining expansion. Based on primary qualitative data, the paper explores two elements: (1) how the symbolic meaning of this landscape has changed over time for the surrounding indigenous communities; and (2) how the different materialities of the salt flat as landscape, as ulexite and as lithium allow understanding of the drivers of socio‐environmental change and conflict in this region. The paper argues that social relations and governance frameworks are interlinked with changing symbolic meanings and the different materialities of the Uyuni salt flat.     

Uncertainty, Risk, Trust, and Information: Public Perceptions of Environmental Issues and Willingness to Take Action

Environmental policymaking has remained an important issue in American public policy for many years. While many individuals have proenvironmental attitudes, they remain unwilling to take the actions necessary to achieve environmental goals. Many variables have been used to explain support for environmental policymaking. This study looks at the effect of uncertainty about environmental quality, perception of risk from environmental hazards, and trust in government and university scientists on willingness to take environmental action. The study examines the impact of these three variables on two environmental issues—tap water and nuclear power. The data were collected from a national sample of 400 individuals. This article presents the results of this research and examines the complex relationships among risks, trust, uncertainty, and willingness to take environmental action. The conclusions improve our understanding of environmental attitudes as well as have practical implications for policymakers who need to build public support for policies designed to improve the environment.     

The Veil of Kyoto and the politics of greenhouse gas mitigation in Australia

This paper investigates how the Kyoto Protocol has framed political discourse and policy development of greenhouse gas mitigation in Australia. We argue that ‘Kyoto’ has created a veil over the climate issue in Australia in a number of ways. Firstly, its symbolic power has distracted attention from actual environmental outcomes while its accounting rules obscure the real level of carbon emissions and structural trends at the nation-state level. Secondly, a public policy tendency to commit to far off emission targets as a compromise to implementing legislation in the short term has also emerged on the back of Kyoto-style targets. Thirdly, Kyoto’s international flexibility mechanisms can lead to the diversion of mitigation investment away from the nation-state implementing carbon legislation. A final concern of the Kyoto approach is how it has shifted focus away from Australia as the world’s largest coal exporter towards China, its primary customer. While we recognise the crucial role aspirational targets and timetables play in capturing the imagination and coordinating action across nations, our central theme is that ‘Kyoto’ has overshadowed the implementation of other policies in Australia. Understanding how ‘Kyoto’ has framed debate and policy is thus crucial to promoting environmentally effective mitigation measures as nation-states move forward from COP15 in Copenhagen to forge a post-Kyoto international agreement. Recent elections in 2009 in Japan and America and developments at COP15 suggest positive scope for international action on climate change. However, the lesson from the 2007 election and subsequent events in Australia is a caution against elevating the symbolism of ‘Kyoto-style’ targets and timetables above the need for implementation of mitigation policies at the nation-state level.     

中国学界对美国环境外交的研究

环境不仅作为一个社会问题引起各界的重视,同时也作为外交的内容被纳入各国的外交政策之中。作为环境大国,美国也日益重视环境在其外交中的地位,并利用环境问题制约他国。本文从四个方面综合评述中国学界对美国环境外交的研究：整体性研究、政府环境外交政策研究、环境外交中具体案例的研究以及美国与他国环境外交的博弈的研究。通过对现有研究的梳理,希望加强对美国环境外交的深入研究,更好地了解美国环境外交的走向。     

Applying Policy Process Theories to Environmental Governance Research: Themes and New Directions

Policy scholars have effectively leveraged policy process models, theories, and frameworks to respond to a variety of important environmental questions. For example, how do environmental issues arrive on the agendas of policymakers? What factors contribute to environmental policy change? What are the designs and effects of institutions (e.g., policies or cultural norms) on environmental governance? In this review, we survey the field of policy process scholarship, focusing on environmental governance, with three objectives. The first objective is to catalog the policy process models, theories, and frameworks most often featured in studies of environmental governance. The second is to capture the methodological choices commonly employed in the application of these models, theories, and frameworks in environmental domains. The third is to identify how these approaches deal with issues central to environmental governance research, including time, space, and policy scale. We aim to identify trends and strategies for integrating key considerations of scale into empirical policy process scholarship.     

Regional and transnational spatial planning1: problems today,perspectives for the future

This introductory contribution presents some results of the EURBANET project, dealing with European urban networks in the framework of the INTERREG IIC programme of the North‐western Metropolitan Area (NWMA). This project was conducted between 2000 and 2001 by researchers of Delft University of Technology, the University of Glasgow, the University of Dortmund, the Catholic University of Leuven and the University of Nijmegen. The central objective of the EURBANET project was to explore the role of polynucleated urban regions in the reinforcement of the competitive strength and quality of life in the NWMA, as a contribution to transnational spatial planning in the NWMA. Four polynuclear urban regions are involved: Randstad Holland, the Flemish Diamond, the RheinRuhr Area and Central Scotland (Glasgow‐Edinburgh region). One of the conclusions is that it is necessary to move between scales: from the European Union to national spatial policies (and vice versa), between national policies and regional spatial policies and between regional and urban spatial policies. At each scale, specific demands for spatial planning policies in polynuclear urban regions are becoming increasingly relevant. This is a challenge for spatial policies and policy domains like infrastructure policy, transport policy, housing policy, economic and environmental policy. We present an analysis of how polycentricity has become central to recent discussions on European and north‐west European spatial and economic planning. We launch a spatial network approach to integrate spatial policies. These wide perspectives contrast heavily with the current less satisfactory practice of spatial planning on the level of urban networks and transnational governance.     

The ‘creative township’ in the post-apartheid: globalisation,nation building or gentrification?

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the ambiguities of post-Apartheid public cultural policies in South Africa by focusing on the case of the Red Location Museum and Cultural precinct (RLMCP), a multisectoral project for socio-economic development, based on tourism, art, culture, heritagisation and urban regeneration, implemented in Red Location, one of the oldest townships of Port Elizabeth. In the post-Apartheid period, cultural policies have been employed as catch-all policies that could lead to urban renewal, desegregation and development. The case of the RLMCP drives home how efforts to use art and culture as leverages to transform townships into the core of the creative city and into the prototype of a new form of neighbourhood led to exclusionary representations and patterns; moreover, it is an example of how cultural policies enforce gentrification dynamics at the local level, in the name of restructuring urban governance and rescaling the city to the global dimension.     

Dangerous Holes in Global Environmental Governance: The Roles of Neoliberal Discourse,Science, and California Agriculture in the Montreal Protocol

Abstract: This paper explores how a relatively successful global environmental treaty, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, is currently undermined by US protectionism. At the “global scale” of environmental governance, powerful nation‐states like the US prolong their domination of certain economic sectors with the assistance of neoliberal discourse. Using empirical data gathered while attending Montreal Protocol meetings from 2003 to 2006, I show how US policy undermines the Montreal Protocol's mandate to phase out methyl bromide (MeBr). At the global scale of environmental governance the US uses a discourse of technical and economic infeasibility because, in the current neoliberal milieu, it cannot make a simply protectionist argument. The discourse, in other words, is protectionism by another name. While much of the literature in critical geography on neoliberalism has focused on de‐regulation versus re‐regulation, this paper illustrates how science, protectionism, and neoliberalism can become articulated uneasily and in sometimes unexpected ways.     

Sustainable Tourism Planning and Consultation: Evidence from the Project INTER.ECO.TUR

Expansion of territories targeted by travellers and growth of attendance rates make tourism sector of significant interest for the implementation of policies on environmental protection at the European Union (EU) level. The need to protect local natural heritage, to integrate tourism industry development policies with the ones pertaining to other sectors that characterize a given territory and to enhance the overall environmental performance are some of the priorities that may appear conflicting at times. This paper discusses a method of analysis and planning aiming to promote potential directives of local governance. This method, representing the outcome of a process coordinated and shared across territories, is oriented towards the sustainable development of the area and refers to the implementation of integrated policies, The Interreg Eco Tourism (INTER.ECO.TUR) project, co-financed by the European Commission under the EU's INTERREG IIIC, provided the research with a useful case study to analyse the dynamics of sustainable tourism development within the European Mediterranean area. The debate of its results offers evidences on the possibility to develop such a governance process effectively, providing insight into an assessment methodology enriched by a clear-cut analysis of its applied experiences.     

Infrastructures of environmental governance

To the extent that environmental governance aspires to be based on positive knowledge of what ‘the environment’ consists of and how it functions, programmes of environmental management must find ways to study it. This article draws on scholarship on knowledge infrastructures to examine a trajectory of scientific work in Ecuador focused on biodiversity and the recent uptake of this infrastructure for the study of climate change. When combined with an appreciation for the character of power and knowledge in modern institutions, analyses of experts’ ‘infrastructure work’ elucidate how environmental problems take shape as objects of expert intervention at the level of concrete, technical practices. Incorporating scientific infrastructure within the ambit of environmental anthropology can help us to understand the shape of environmental politics to come.     

Campaign Promises,Democratic Governance,and Environmental Policy in the U.S. Congress

One important criterion for assessing the quality of democratic governance is the extent to which the policy process effectively translates citizen preferences into collective choices. Several scholars have observed a discrepancy between citizen preferences for strong environmental protection and weak policies adopted in the United States, indicating that the United States may fall short on this criterion. We examine one possible mechanism contributing to this discrepancy—legislator defection from campaign promises. Our data indicate that legislators in the U.S. Congress routinely defect from their campaign promises in environmental protection, undermining the link between citizen preferences and policy choice. We also find that legislators are much more likely to defect from pro‐environmental campaign promises, which moves government policy toward less stringent environmental programs. Finally, the propensity of legislators to defect from their campaign promises is systematic, with defection affected by partisanship, constituency influence, the influence of the majority party, and the likely consequences of defection for policy choice. These findings contribute empirical evidence relevant to the “mandate theory” perspective on how citizen preferences are translated into collective choices through the policy process. These findings may also complement research in comparative politics concluding that legislatures selected through single member districts adopt less stringent environmental policies than do legislatures chosen via proportional representation in that the mechanism for this effect may go through legislator defection from campaign promises.     

Theories of Governance: Comparative Perspectives on Seattle's Light Rail Project

Governance entails the formulation and implementation of public policies across organizational and sectoral boundaries through coalitions, contracts, and networks. Studies of governance tend to cluster loosely into two theoretic traditions: rational choice and sociological institutionalism. Where the former analyzes actors’ individual interests and information, the latter examines their joint relationships and norms. These different analytic foci can be difficult to reconcile, leaving scholars at a loss as to how to cumulate insights and knowledge across the theoretic traditions. To understand better how the two traditions conflict and support one another in the analysis of governance, this article distinguishes domains of governance and identifies the different theories that the traditions use to study each domain. A case study of a rail transit project compares the insights from these theories, and assesses the quality and the complementarities of the explanations they offer. An analysis of the case generates propositions about the comparative utility of different concepts and theoretic traditions for understanding key governance phenomena.     

Brutes, beasts and empire: veterinary medicine and environmental policy in French North Africa and British India

The deep, and persistent, colonial roots of many contemporary environmental policies around the world have been increasingly recognized over the last decade. Research in the sectors of agriculture, forestry, human medicine, and public health has illuminated how environmental policies were constructed and utilized during the colonial period, as well as how many of these policies remain influential today. This paper examines the as yet little explored contribution of colonial veterinary medicine to the development and implementation of environmental policy. By comparing the experiences of the French in North Africa and the British in India, it demonstrates that some colonial veterinarians had a great deal of influence on environmental policy while others had very little. In French North Africa veterinarians played a significant role in developing rangeland management policies that impacted large swaths of these three territories, policies that can still be felt today. In British India, by contrast, the role of colonial veterinarians in developing environmental policy was much more circumscribed and, in the end, largely inconsequential. The paper suggests that three primary factors account for most of this dissimilarity: the differences in animal diseases present in India and the Maghreb; the differences between French and British veterinary education before the twentieth century; and the differences in colonial administration between the two European powers.     

Governance,Policy Innovation,and Local Economic Development in North Carolina

This article examines the extent to which local governments in North Carolina embrace innovation in their economic development activities. The study makes a distinctive theoretical contribution by examining the relationship between innovation in how economic development policies are administered and implemented (using concepts associated with governance and NPM), and innovation in what is substantively done (policy innovation). An analysis of the results from a statewide survey of local governments in North Carolina finds that certain governance/management variables are significant determinants of economic development policy innovation. An implication of this finding is that new ways of doing economic development may go hand‐in‐hand with new ways of governing and managing. Many of the governance/management variables are also positively associated with the use of a greater number of traditional economic development strategies and tools. This suggests that local governments may find it helpful to be innovative in how they implement economic development irrespective of the substantive policy orientation of particular strategies and tools.     

The ambivalent relations behind civil society’s engagement in the “grey zones” of migration and integration governance: Case studies from Belgium

Based on qualitative data collected in two different Belgian cities (Brussels and Liège), this article focuses on the emergence of civil society initiatives to address the grey zones of migration and integration governance in the country. We define the concept of grey zones as situations that appear in specific time-spaces where problematic issues arise and the state fails to intervene. This triggers the intervention of civil society to deal with specific governance issues. In Belgium, the state – through an indifference-as-policy approach – delegates the responsibilities of reception and integration policies to multiple actors and leaves space for a variety of citizens’ initiatives to emerge. The grey zones of government policies become spaces for possible citizen-organised actions aimed at both providing initial reception and legal support to migrants, and denouncing the absence of state intervention. These citizen actions operate in particular on the issue of housing and reception of forced migrants with different legal status and migration aspirations. We also highlight the ambivalent relations emerging between civil society actors and the state. Through the analysis of two situated case studies, this article aims to provide evidence on how these civil society initiatives develop and how their humanitarian approach becomes political.     

Coping with Peripheralization: Governance Response in Two German Small Cities

Urban governance processes and strategies in small cities in times of an integrated global economy have received little attention in urban research. However, in Germany as elsewhere they form the backbone of the urban system. On the basis of research in two small German cities—Pirmasens and Völklingen—this paper discusses local governance approaches in reaction to peripheralization. Peripheralization here is defined as a process of out-migration, dis-connection, dependency and stigmatization. The two case studies show quite different patterns of political governance. Pirmasens demonstrates a collective local project on how to deal with structural change, while Völklingen shows a more fragmented approach to overcoming peripheralization. These different political reactions are analysed and related to aspects of specific local settings. It is to be hoped that in future cohesion policy at the European level, but also on the respective national levels, more active policies will be targeted towards nurturing place-based opportunities for small cities.