Gwaabaw: Applying Anishinaabe harvesting protocols to energy governance

Oil and gas extraction has transformed Anishinaabe society in ways that undermine the consensual, holistic, and egalitarian basis of natural law. To many Indigenous people, framing fossil fuels and other energy sources as “natural resources” does not accurately define energy projects or capture related risks. Some Anishinaabe pipeline opponents have suggested that traditional harvesting protocols—culturally embedded moral precepts that govern the gathering of food and medicinal plants—also be applied to activities that produce energy. This paper explores how this could be done, focusing on tar sands extraction and the Line 3 expansion plan. I begin by discussing Anishinaabe harvesting protocols, identifying four overlapping key concepts: rights, responsibility, relationality, and reciprocity. These principles are then mapped onto Anishinaabe understandings of oil, hydro, wind, and solar energy. The resulting analysis challenges extractivist narratives of energy production, opening possibilities to rethink the relationship between people and energy as well as the values that inform energy decisions.     

Advocacy Group Messaging on Social Media: Using the Narrative Policy Framework to Study Twitter Messages about Nuclear Energy Policy in the United States

Increasingly, policy scholars are using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to systematically study the narrative elements and strategies that policy actors and groups use to advance their agendas. The majority of these studies analyze reports, documents, and websites published by the actors and groups that are most active in the policy subsystem. Though useful, these “public consumption documents” can be difficult to find and relatively static. In this article, we suggest that the constant flow of messages and content that competing actors and groups publish on social media may provide a solution to this problem. To test this proposition, we use the NPF to analyze messages published on Twitter by competing advocacy groups in the U.S. nuclear energy policy subsystem from January 2014 to May 2014 (n = 703). We find that both groups use Twitter to disseminate messages that contain the basic elements of policy narratives. Moreover, the narratives they use include strategies that are consistent with their position in the subsystem. These findings demonstrate the utility of the NPF for research on social media and, more importantly, validate the use of Twitter data in future work on the NPF.     

Chinese engagement in Southeast Asian energy and mineral resources: motivations and outlook

Abstract

The energy and mineral resource base of Southeast Asia is relatively modest by international standards. Nevertheless, Chinese energy and mining companies have been investing heavily in the region over recent years, in comparison with multinational companies and state-backed companies from other Asian countries. This paper applies a framework derived from the field of business studies to analyze why the scale of China’s engagement in Southeast Asia has become so great and how the motivations vary between the different energy and resource industries. The motivations for these activities reflect a mix of corporate and state objectives. Corporate objectives include securing energy or resource supply chains, increasing or diversifying their asset base, and enhancing their profits or market share. The motivations of the government range from straightforward support of the companies for the purpose of industrial strategy and security of resource supply, to development assistance and regional strategic positioning. The different motivations of the oil and gas, hydropower, and mining industries arise from the particular character of each market, both within China and globally. Southeast Asia has the twin advantages of geographic and apparent cultural proximity to China. Nevertheless, inexperience and a desire to catch up with their international peers have resulted in companies applying low social and environmental standards in some high profile projects. The subsequent disputes, together with the current low level of resource prices, may constrain the further growth of Chinese investment in the near future.     

谈我国南极研究的发展

本文简要介绍了我国南极科学考察事业的发展,并结合作者亲自参加第五次南极考察的体会和各主要国家对南极资源、能源和环境关注的动态提出了我国今后在南极研究中一些值得注意的问题.     

元明清北京的能源供应及其生态效应

元明清三朝定都北京以后,城市能源中的木柴、木炭主要来源于周边地区的森林。林木的过度砍伐,对太行山北段、燕山南麓山区造成了显著的生态破坏,在明清时期表现得尤为突出。煤炭在能源构成中的地位越来越重要,但采煤对西山一带的地表形态、植被覆盖、河流水源等所造成的危害也不容忽视。文献和碑刻资料,证实了北京能源供应的发展过程及其连带的生态效应。     

对"一五"时期能源工业建设的重新审视

“一五”时期我国集中进行的大规模能源工业建设取得了突出成就,对国民经济的发展产生了积极影响:煤炭工业得到迅速恢复和发展,支援了其他工业的建设;一批电力企业建成投产,大大增加了发电量;经过大规模勘探开发,原油产量大幅提高。今天我们重新审视“一五”时期的能源建设,应认真总结和吸取经验教训,制定稳定的能源政策:能源工业建设要遵循经济发展规律,要与国力相适应,尽量避免非经济因素的负面影响;要把外国先进经验和技术同我国国情相结合,处理好自力更生与争取外援的关系;要坚持可持续发展的原则,对各种能源合理地开发利用,同时注意环境保护。     

Obsidian provenance analyses at Göytepe,Azerbaijan: Implications for understanding Neolithic socioeconomies in the southern Caucasus

This study presents a provenance analysis of the Neolithic obsidian assemblages from the early to mid‐sixth millennium bc settlement at Göytepe, Azerbaijan. The study is unique in that (1) it involves a complete, non‐selected obsidian assemblage (901 artefacts) from one particular area of the site; (2) the material is derived from a well‐stratified sequence of 10 securely radiocarbon‐dated architectural levels; and (3) the use of an extraordinarily wide range of sources (more than 20) was identified by provenance analysis using energy‐dispersive X‐ray fluorescence. The results reveal a previously unknown diachronic change in obsidian use in the region, suggesting the occurrence of significant socioeconomic changes during the Late Neolithic of the southern Caucasus.     

Making Space for Wind Farms: Practices of Territorial Stigmatisation in Rural Denmark

While issues of siting wind farms have often revolved around their local resistance, finding adequate locations and gaining access to land for large wind energy projects has become an increasingly significant challenge for developers, in particular in small countries with relatively mature wind energy sectors, such as Denmark. By drawing on the case of “Outskirts‐Denmark”, this paper focuses on how existing territorial stigma of rural areas is co‐produced and mobilised by wind farm developers to make space for large wind farm projects. In doing so, we demonstrate that the mobilisation of stigma through derogatory rhetoric and forecasting rural decline is used to legitimise the purchase and demolition of properties in marginalised rural areas. We then critically discuss how these developer practices produce controversies over the erosion of rural communities and are entangled in a neoliberal undermining of the planning system, revealing issues of rural energy justice.     

Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback

Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy change remain elusive: The effects of exogenous factors on the politics underlying policy change are not sufficiently conceptualized and empirically analyzed. To address this gap, we propose to distinguish between truly exogenous factors and policy outcomes to better understand policy change. Specifically, we combine the Advocacy Coalition Framework with policy feedback theory to conceptualize a complete feedback loop among policy, policy outcomes, and subsequent politics. Aiming at theory-building, we use policy feedback mechanisms to explain why advocacy coalitions change over time. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal single case study on policy-induced technological change in the German energy subsystem, an extreme case of policy outcomes, from 1983 to 2013. First, using discourse network analysis, we identify four patterns of actor movements, explaining coalition decline and growth. Second, using process tracing, we detect four policy feedback mechanisms explaining these four actor movements. With this inductive mixed-methods approach, we build a conceptual framework in which policy outcomes affect subsequent politics through feedback mechanisms. We develop propositions on how coalition change and feedback mechanisms explain four ideal-typical trajectories of policy change.