Scaling just transitions: Legitimation strategies in coal phase-out commissions in Canada and Germany

Climate change mitigation triggers both spatial and moral complexities, as demonstrated by the contentious issue of phasing out coal power. The success of the Paris Agreement depends on, among other things, the acceptability of climate policy measures and thus, from a moral perspective, on the ability to organize transition processes in ways that do not damage the livelihoods of workers, communities, and entire regions. Spatially, the unequal distributions of burdens and advantages of both climate change and respective mitigation measures provoke struggles over their legitimacy in contexts ranging from local to global. Phasing out coal mining and the respective power generation capacity thus triggers processes of structural transformation that cut across geographic scales, vertical levels of policy and politics, as well as sectoral boundaries.In light of the urgency of the climate crisis, countries such as Canada and Germany have established stakeholder-driven commissions to develop proposals for just transition pathways for phasing out coal production and consumption. We argue that these commissions are arenas in which spatial, moral, and sectoral (re-)negotiations materialize. Comparing the Canadian and German stakeholder commissions through expert interviews with their members, the article traces how governments use commissions to legitimize their transition policies. Expectations at different levels and from different actors in turn place commission members under pressure to justify their involvement and the outputs of the commissions. We find that the Canadian task force showed greater commitment to collecting and reflecting the needs of communities in its coal regions, and to communicating these to the federal government. In the German coal commission, legitimation strategies focused mainly on a broad representation of interests, and on government spending for affected regions, workers, and industries. In that case, a compromise was reached that satisfied most, but not all, of the diverse requirements.     

Vattel's law of nations and just war theory

It has often been said that Vattel's treatise on the law of nations breaks with the tradition of modern natural law and just war theory. Based on a closer examination of Vattel's justification of preventive war and of his assessment of the balance of power in Europe, the paper argues that this criticism is greatly exaggerated, if not entirely misleading.     

The Fremont Complex: A Behavioral Perspective

The Fremont complex is composed of farmers and foragers who occupied the Colorado Plateau and Great Basin region of western North America from about 2100 to 500 years ago. These people included both immigrants and indigenes who shared some material culture and symbolic attributes, but also varied in ways not captured by definitions of the Fremont as a shared cultural tradition. The complex reflects a mosaic of behaviors including full-time farmers, full-time foragers, part-time farmer/foragers who seasonally switched modes of production, farmers who switched to full-time foraging, and foragers who switched to full-time farming. Farming defines the Fremont, but only in the sense that it altered the matrix in which both farmers and foragers lived, a matrix which provided a variety of behavioral options to people pursuing an array of adaptive strategies. The mix of symbiotic and competitive relationships among farmers and between farmers and foragers presents challenges to detection in the archaeological record. Greater clarity results from use of a behavioral model which recognizes differing contexts of selection favoring one adaptive strategy over another. The Fremont is a case where the transition from foraging to farming is followed by a millennium of adaptive diversity and terminates with the abandonment of farming. As such, it serves as a potential comparison to other cases in the world during the early phases of the food producing transition.     

Revolutionary versus Reactionary: Contrasting Portuguese and Spanish Civil-Military Relations during Democratisation

The military is an important factor for the success or failure of democratisation processes. Portugal and Spain provide two paradigmatic cases. Despite their socio-economic, political and cultural similarities, these countries developed very different civil-military relations which significantly impacted their transitions. After having handed power over to a civilian dictator, Salazar, the Portuguese military eventually caused the downfall of his authoritarian Estado Novo regime and steered the transition to democracy. In contrast, the Spanish military, which had helped Franco defeat the Second Republic, remained loyal to the dictator’s principles and, after his death, obstructed the democratisation process. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, this interdisciplinary article contrasts the challenges posed by the military and the policies implemented by the Iberian governments to depoliticise and control it. It shows that the failed coups d’état in these countries helped tighten civilian control and paved the way for democratic consolidation. Using a policy instruments comparative framework, this paper demonstrates that not only the attitudes of the military but also the tools used to keep them under control were substantially different in Portugal and Spain. Historical legacies from the Spanish Civil War, Second World War and Colonial conflicts, as well as contextual factors, serve to explain this variation.     

Contesting the ‘greening’ of hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon

The 21st century has witnessed a resurgence of hydropower projects across the globe, with the energy source an integral part of contemporary sustainable energy transitions. Yet, the environmentalist credentials of hydropower remain contested by anti-dam movements. This paper details the cases of the Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós dams in the Brazilian Amazon to explore how the development, submission and acceptance of an Environmental Impact Assessment provides a key site in the contestation of hydroelectric projects. Whilst the provision of this document – and the wider environmental licensing process – represents a key component in the asserted ‘green-ness’ of hydropower, opposition groups extend the scope of analysis to include indirect and cumulative impacts that remain understudied in official assessments. This paper analyses interviews and questionnaires with and documents provided by national and international civil society organisations to trace this process of challenge and critique. It details how civil society actors forward alternative assessments of the impacts of the projects studied, uncovering and illuminating overlooked and understudied externalities of hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon. An analysis of this process not only demonstrates that the ‘green’ credentials of hydropower remain far from assured but also highlights how anti-dam actors advance new ‘sustainabilities’ to discredit the terrain upon which such credentials are set.     

Prosaic state governance of community low carbon transitions

This paper unpacks the complex relations between community low carbon transitions, the prosaic state, neoliberal modes of governing, and the role of numbers therein. It aims to outline the ways in which the prosaic state can, through everyday tasks, decisions, measurements and demonstration requirements, force a calculative logic onto and into community based movements and groups in ways that can be counterproductive. It centrally argues that the will to quantify, in particular the accompanying demonstration requirements (most often a number), enacts three fundamental shifts in the collective subjectivity integral to community groups and movements. First, the preferred form of knowledge becomes abstract, disembodied and fungible (episteme) over and against relational ways to understand and conceive togetherness (mētis), including ecological relationships. Second, the vision of community shifts from a search to belong, an intrinsic end in itself, towards an instrumental means to achieve specific targets. Finally, third, the splitting of means from ends. These can all be traced from the demonstration requirements, and numbers, accompanying neoliberal prosaic state engagement with community groups.     

The Virtue Ethic Difference in the Just War Discourse of James Turner Johnson and Catholic Social Teaching

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how incorporating virtue ethics into the process of interpreting and responding to conflict re-shapes the understanding and application of just war theory. More specifically, I analyze James Turner Johnson's idea of just war and the implications of Thomistic virtue ethics. My argument in this article is that Johnson's rule-based idea of just war theory lacks the more integrated virtue ethic, which we find in Thomas and in the re-appropriation of Thomistic virtue ethics in contemporary Catholic Social Teaching's discourse on just war. This contributes to Johnson's idea of just war being inconsistent with the direction of contemporary Catholic Social Teaching on just war theory, particularly regarding the presumption against war. His lack of a virtue ethic also contributes to an inadequate understanding, development, and application of basic just war criteria, particularly from a Catholic perspective.     

THE GREEN ECONOMY,SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS AND TRANSITION REGIONS: A CASE STUDY OF BOSTON

This article is focused upon exploring the development of the green economy in particular locations, with the aim of identifying why some cities and regions have been successful in engendering green growth. To date we have little idea where the green economy is developing, nor much insight, beyond anecdotal evidence, into why certain cities and regions appear to be more successful than others in this regard. We position our analysis within the context of research on socio‐technical transitions that has theorized the potential shift to a more sustainable economy. We review the literature on sustainability transitions and the development of the multi‐level perspective encompassing niches, regimes and landscapes. However, most research into socio‐technical transitions has not given adequate consideration to the influence of places and spatial scale in these transition processes, and we therefore critique the socio‐technical transitions literature from a geographical perspective. In this article we are interested in four key questions. What role does the enabling and facilitative state play in these cities and regions? What new institutional forms and governance structures are being developed? How do actors in particular cities and regions construct their green vision, and how do they encourage other actors to buy‐in to this vision? How are links across levels and spatial scales developed to connect niches with the regime? We address these through a focus upon the Boston city‐region in the USA, drawing upon both primary and secondary research material. We utilize this case study example to re‐examine and re‐theorize work on sustainability transitions from a spatial perspective.     

Paving the Way for Baghdad: The US Invasion of Panama, 1989

ABSTRACT

In December 1989, the United States unleashed its might against Panama. The invasion, Operation Just Cause, was the largest military operation conducted by the US since Vietnam and its first post-Cold War intervention. US troops invaded a foreign country, quickly occupied it, and withdrew before engendering a violent insurgency. Although George H. W. Bush authorized an illegal invasion which invited international denunciation, its quick and successful resolution concealed serious issues. Senior officials who served Bush senior, but who badly failed his son, also drew important lessons from the invasion. Just Cause demonstrated how a small and mobile force using overwhelming firepower could decapitate an enemy regime and establish the conditions for the development of a democratic state. The invasion also prefigured the justification for US interventionism in the post-Cold War: spreading democracy and protecting human rights. An easy victory on the surface, the Panamanian intervention paved the way for a greater calamity on the Tigris decades later. Just Cause provided US policy-makers with a false sense of confidence and optimism that paved the path for the invasion of Baghdad in 2003.