Analysing How Environmental Concerns are Integrated in the Design of the EU Structural Funds Programmes

This paper analyses the environmental measures co-financed by the European Union (EU) Structural Funds in the less-developed regions. Specifically, it studies if these environmental measures are tailored to the specific needs of the different regions and whether they are driven by an ecological modernization approach. The inclusion of environmental goals into the regional policy is also tested by analysing its connection with the main European environmental directives. We find a suitability of the regional programmes to the regional specific environmental factors, a scarce presence of the ecological modernization paradigm behind the programmes implementation and a clear orientation of the regional programmes to meet the EU legislation.     

City branding in polycentric urban regions: identification,profiling and transformation in the Randstad and Rhine-Ruhr

In polycentric urban regions several distinct cities, none of which is dominant, cooperate and compete with each other to attract inhabitants and firms. In such settings city branding strategies do not solely affect one city, but the entire region. We examined how city branding in the face of ecological modernization, that is, delivering higher added economic value, while lowering environmental impacts, is playing out in the Dutch Randstad and the German Rhine-Ruhr. Our findings show that regional identity formation occurs at the sub-polycentric urban region level, coinciding more with (historical) economic profiles than with planning imaginaries. The Dutch cities profile themselves more along the lines of ecological modernization than their German counterparts. Differences between subregions within each polycentric urban region are also noticeable, where more industrialized regions, such as the Ruhr or southern Randstad focus on ‘green’, ‘liveable’ and ‘knowledge-oriented’, while cities with stronger knowledge-intensive sectors portray themselves as ‘smart’ or ‘sustainable’. Cities generally substantiate their profiles through projects, but a significant gap persists between reality and aspirations for improved environmental conditions. This is especially true for the Dutch cities, where many claims, but little visible action can be observed.     

Social Movements and Ecological Modernization: The Transformation of Pulp and Paper Manufacturing

Ecological modernization theory posits that social movements play a central role in the environmental transformation of contemporary society. How they do so has received limited scholarly attention. This article seeks to reduce this thesis to a number of propositions which are then examined in light of the experience of the pulp and paper industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on field research and interviews in Southeast Asia, Australia and the United States, as well as available data, the study finds that social movements were instrumental in the environmental transformation of the pulp industry, with important differences between North and South. It concludes with a call for more nuanced studies of the influence of social movements on different sectors and countries, especially in newly industrializing countries where more tenuous and dependent forms of ecological modernization may be emerging.     

中国现代化进程中的生态困境

中国在建设社会主义现代化的进程中,对环境保护做了很多有益的尝试,但依然而临着严峻的生态困境。各种类型的自然灾害、重大环境污染和生态破坏事件频发;随着城市化进程的不断加快,城市所面临的环境危机也日益凸显;环境保护的政策与治理虽有改进,但进展缓慢,中国生态恢复和环境保护的前景不容乐观。为此,必须转变经济发展方式,实现经济、社会和环境的协调发展。     

德国的环境变迁与环境史研究--访德国环境史学家亚克西姆·纳得考教授

亚克西姆·纳得考教授是德国著名环境史学家.2002年笔者在美进行环境史学研究期间,专门就德国环境史学问题访问了纳得考教授.访谈主要涉及两方面的内容一是关于德国的环境变迁,尤其是对环境变迁的感知,如自然的思想、景观的概念、绿党的历史、生态现代化的理论、疾病与环境的关系、社会制度与环境的关系、自然保护与文化的关系等;二是从与美国比较的角度分析德国环境史学史,重点探讨环境史在德国的起源和发展、它与全球史的关系、未来的发展趋势等.这个访谈为中国学者了解德国的环境史学提供了基本线索,有助于中国学者深入认识德国环境史的特性.     

Economic challenges for the EU Water Framework Directive reform and implementation

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) is a unique and historic piece of environmental legislation, combining ecological and economic dimensions. The aim of the WFD is to ensure sustainable socio-economic management of the resource, protecting the quantity and quality of water. The complexity of this political, ecological and economic framework has led to misinterpretation and implementation problems among Member States, and thus to unsatisfactory outcomes. This paper analyses the economic science challenges for the upcoming WFD reform and its subsequent implementation, and gives some recommendations about how to handle these challenges. Consensus is required on the definitions of the existing economic concepts and tools currently included in European Union (EU) water policy (through the original WFD) and the methods for operationalizing them. Additionally, this will help fill key gaps, such as the lack of suitably skilled practitioners and the need for homogeneous economic knowledge among Member States. Furthermore, it seems necessary to integrate additional emerging concepts into the water policy debate and its praxis in the EU context.     

Regional environmental planning: Progress and possibilities in Western Europe

The challenge of environmental thinking is putting extreme stresses on the imagination and techniques of planners, at least in those European countries where ecological issues are being taken seriously. Generally, city or regional planners, and academics as well, are only at the beginning of a necessarily rapid learning curve. It is argued here that a spatial planning approach to guiding environmental change could usefully complement other sectoral or financial instruments, particularly if focused at regional levels. Important dimensions of different approaches are analyzed, including the political economic model, the degree of development and wealth (north‐south variation) and the institutional framework in each country. The progress made so far is examined in case studies of the Netherlands, England and Catalonia. It is suggested that some aspects of the Dutch approach could form a useful basis, if suitably adapted, for regional planning elsewhere. But, above all, much more fundamental thinking on the goals and means of desirable regional transitions will be necessary.     

Wine and Modernity in the Transylvanian Saxon Imagination (1860–1930)

Abstract

Transylvanian Saxon writings on wine and viniculture provide unusually informative insights as to the small East European community’s responses to the impacts of modernization: loss of corporate privileges, minority status in first Habsburg Hungary and after the First World War, Romania, and increasing integration into a global economy. Transylvanian Saxons imbued wine with symbolic functions beyond its dietary or economic importance; viniculture and wine embodied Saxon aspirations and fears for the future. While ethnographers invoked the traditions embodied in wine to shore up Saxon status within Transylvania, economists extolled viniculture as an industry capable of modernization and a secure financial future for the community. Conversely, Saxon abstinence campaigners identified wine as the root of the Saxons’ decline, and hoped to build a better future through its abolition. Through its symbolic roles, wine and viniculture reveal the potentials and limitations the Transylvanian Saxon community faced in confronting modernization.     

西部大开发与自然环境保护及生态建设

当前已经开始的西部大开发 ,是事关我国现代化建设和中华民族长远生存与发展的重大战略问题。本文在详细分析了西部现有生态环境的基础上 ,对在大开发中如何保护自然环境及进行生态建设作了论证。     

The California Indian Before European Contact

The stereotype image of California Indians as crude, simple and docile people who openly embraced European settlement and were quickly covered with a blanket of civilization reflects little understanding of both the sophisticated institutional and ecological base that underlined aboriginal occupancy. This study analyzes aboriginal occupancy of California in a series of maps depicting language territories, population, settlement, subsistence, trade and institutional patterns. The decline of the California Indian after European contact is also mapped and discussed. The relationship between population density and distribution, settlement, territorial organization and subsistence was very closely tied to a common environmental thread, but it was the clever use of social institutions that insured the persistence of the California Indian     

中世纪晚期西欧乡村工业及乡村纺织业的兴起

中世纪晚期西欧乡村工业的发展蔚为壮观,其时乡村工业主要有家庭副业、家庭作坊和分散的手工工场等形式。西欧乡村工业的重心是在不断变迁的,其生产规模也在不断扩大;以市场为中心、以利润为目标使乡村工业逐渐从农业中脱离出来,这样与所谓的“原工业”相连接了。西欧乡村工业中最为突出的是纺织业,自然资源、技术与分工、农业商品化、乡村劳动力、市场需求等因素都是乡村纺织工业勃兴的原因。中世纪晚期西欧乡村工业的发展是西欧社会工业化或现代化的前奏。     

日本农业现代化过程中的环境问题及其对策

本文从日本农业现代化过程中出现的环境问题及其解决对策入手,对日本早期农业现代化过程中由于高投入、大量使用化肥、农药、以破坏资源提高产量为代价而产生的环境问题进行了系统的考察,在此基础上,具体分析了日本在农业现代化过程中解决生态环境问题的对策,并总结了日本实现农业可持续发展的经验,可以为我国提供有益的借鉴。     

Beyond Modernization and Development, or Why the Poor Reject Development

This paper examines the processes and impact of modernization and development paradigms upon poor communities in non-Western societies. It traces the original classical meaning of modernization as being a process of transformation of the rural economy into modern industrial urban-based capitalist society. This transformed society at a later stage through colonization exports "modern development" to these non-Western societies but with very different consequences in terms of their impact on the lives of millions of people who are marginalized and exploited through these means.
Instead of transforming their agriculture into modern industrial development, these societies are subjected to a "reverse modernization" in which the prior European industrial relations and structure are superimposed on to the traditional structures of the Third World using neo-traditional ideologies and structures as part of the process of penetration. This "enforced development" is resisted in many parts of the world and rejected through diverse means including post-traditionalism. The paper ends by posing questions as to what are the appropriate responses to modernization and development as we move towards the twenty-first century.     

浅议榆林市地域生态环境建设

榆林市位于我国东部季风气候区和西北干旱气候区的过渡带,毛乌素沙漠前缘,生态环境问题极其严重。因此,榆林市地域生态环境建设问题是榆林市规划与建设的最主要方面。本文借鉴国外城市生态环境研究的现状与实践,针对榆林地区生态环境的特点,对榆林市的地域生态环境建设提出理论框架,提出了榆林市地域生态环境系统建设设想,以期创建榆林市优美的地域生态环境。     

环境史中的欧洲特殊道路问题

欧洲为什么率先进行工业革命是一个永恒的问题,从东西方环境史比较的角度可能会对此得出独特的解释。当然,这种比较必须建立在坚实的实地研究的基础上。本文要分析的十个问题是：谨慎对待精神观点,环境史的制度分析,耕地与牧场的平衡与失衡,西欧的婚姻模式,延续、持续性和自给自足,森林和权力,欧洲多中心主义的优势,魏特夫“亚细亚生产方式”的绿色复兴,欧洲殖民主义的环境影响,环境史上是否存在一个“欧洲奇迹”。从这十方面的比较中会对“环境史中的欧洲特殊道路问题”有更清楚的把握,进而揭示出一个辩证的历史逻辑,即“长期的成功恰恰加剧了危机”。这或许就是东方前现代的繁荣昭示给现在西方文明的前景。     

What Time Is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography

Rather than reflect on the process of an alleged "modernization" of historical scholarship, an intercultural comparison of historiography should take the European origins of academic history as its starting point. The reason, as this article argues, is that in non-European countries the European genealogy of the discipline of history continued to structure interpretations of the past. Both on the level of method, but more importantly on the level of interpretive strategies, "Europe" remained the yardstick for historiographical explanation. This article will use the example of postwar Japanese historiography to show that historians resorted to a European model in order to turn seemingly unconnected events in the Japanese past into a historical narrative. This is not to imply, however, that Japanese historiography passively relied on concepts from Western discourse. On the contrary, Japanese historians appropriated and transformed the elements of this discourse in the specific geopolitical setting of the 1940s and 1950s. This act of appropriation served the political purpose of positioning Japan with respect to Asia and the "West." However, on an epistemological level, the priority of "Europe" persisted; Japanese historiography remained a "derivative discourse." Studies in comparative historiography, therefore, should be attentive to these traces of the European descent of academic history and privilege the transnational history of historiography over meditations on its internal rationalization.     

Modernization of Costa Rica's Beef Cattle Economy: 1950-1985

Measured in strictly economic terms of profits, diversified exports, hard currency earnings and a more favorable trade balance, Costa Rica's beef cattle economy took a giant step toward modernization between 1950-1985. Unfortunately, this modernization had a minimum of socially desirable and environmentally adaptive components. Costa Rica, like other developing Latin American countries, is learning that economic development frequently entails painful social and ecological costs.     

论我国生态税制的构建

生态税收是政府通过对破坏生态环境的行为(生产行为和消费行为)征收相应数量的税收,用于环境保护的投资或对保护环境的行为的税收支出,以保持生态平衡的一种税收体系。中国日趋严峻的生态环境、生态税制的缺位、可持续发展战略的实现以及提高公民环保意识迫切要求构建我国的生态税收体系。因此,制定完备的《生态税法》;改革旧税种,创立新税种完善税收体系;奖惩并重、税收征收与支出并举,就成为构建我国生态税制的基本思路。     

Environment and integration on the edge of Europe

While European integration has predominantly been addressed in terms of its common market and through questions of European identity, this article explores alternate perspectives of environment in peripheral landscapes as a practice through which European center-periphery relations are negotiated. Drawing on two case studies, namely the Bulgarian Black Sea coast and the arid regions of Almeria in southeast Spain, we highlight how these landscapes have been variously framed as explicitly European spaces through either developmental narratives or environmental activism and advocacy. We argue that European integration is realized and contested through the discursive and material transformation of landscapes. With this, we contribute to an understanding of environmentalism and the politics of the environment as instrumental in addressing broader and parallel political concerns. Combining southern and eastern European perspectives on the political geography of the environment, we show that the landscape functions as an intrinsically political arena that materializes and discursively frames the different meanings and interests of European integration at stake.