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Foucault's account of the emergence of biopolitics in the late 18th century helps frame the political economy of 'improvements' as an environmental project linked to the well-being of the population. Since the 1970s, biopolitical concerns have shifted towards non-human populations and the reproduction of natural resources and ecosystems. This has become evident in the European fisheries, where after decades of exploitation greatly intensified since the 1960s, the extractive demands of the fishing industry have caught up with the reproductive capacities of most commercially targeted fish stocks. This contradiction has given rise to a new political economy of 'improvements' that seeks to sustain the biological health of commercially targeted fish populations while maintaining an economically profitable fishing industry. Central to this transition is the active role that fishers are expected to play in sustainably managing the fish stocks they exploit while adapting to 'green' market opportunities. Tradeable quota systems, eco-accreditation schemes and community-based resource management have all emerged as managerial strategies for inciting the active participation of fishers in this 'common' project of sustainable development. Drawing on Foucault's perspective of governmentality, this paper argues that these strategies represent distinct but overlapping apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality that are representative of broader tendencies within environmental governance today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradeable permit systems for allocating rights to impact the environment have become an important part of the regulatory toolkit over the last 35 years. Informed by elegant neoclassical economic thought, these regulatory markets promise lowest-cost environmental benefit by delegating decision-making to market participants. This article examines tradeable permits systems, including cap-and-trade carbon markets, tradeable water quality permits, and individual transferable quotas for fisheries, to understand the actual outcomes of attempts to transfer environmental governance to markets. Drawing on heterodox economic thought and the neoliberal natures literature, this article examines the institutional forms tradeable permit systems engender in conjunction with a neoclassical definition of ‘market’ to provide an internal critique of environmental marketization. In general, tradeable permit systems do not facilitate highly liquid financial markets that might signal the increasing importance of regulatory markets as an accumulation strategy for capital. Instead, market-based regulation tends to behave rather differently, acting as performance standards, quotas, or environmental taxes. The article concludes by reflecting on the political possibilities afforded by the recognition that regulatory markets, for the most part, bear little resemblance to high-flying financial markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At all levels of governance from international convention to local policy, the regulation of pollution from boats and ships has been steeped in conflict and subject to resistance. Recreational boaters, in particular, are often highly resistant to attempts to regulate their boating activity, particularly on environmental grounds. Such ongoing resistance poses a significant policy compliance challenge. This paper seeks to shed light on this complex, ongoing and broader field of opposition to environmental management by way of a case study analysis of resistance to on-board sewage regulations on the part of recreational boaters in Queensland, Australia. This resistance on the part of ‘everyday’ citizens is examined through the lens of heterotopia. In consequence, the paper can contribute to understandings more broadly of problems beleaguering environmental policy while also attending to the deeply implicated social roles of recreational boating spaces; namely as heterotopias of compensation and/or illusion. It also highlights how these heterotopic positionings are intensified by the scatological orientation of the policy under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Projects are often praised for their efficiency, responsiveness to local context, and capacity to spur innovation, especially in comparison to more permanent organizations. Projects – cross-cutting organizational forms chartered to advance well-defined objectives during a specified period of time – have been a staple organizational form in the private sector, but only recently have scholars started to evaluate their relevance to governance within developed economies. In this paper, we explore projectification – i.e. expanded reliance on temporally bounded organizations – as a conceptual frame to advance understanding of environmental governance and as an empirical vehicle to incorporate temporal scales into a literature that has largely been focused on questions of spatial scale and levels of social organization. Through a case study of the United States Department of Agriculture’s recently created Regional Conservation Partnership Program, we critically assess the concept of projectification. Based on interviews with key policy analysts and administrators and a review of policy documents, we critically evaluate prospects for project forms to empower local actors, produce new knowledge, and disrupt the policy field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing carbon emissions from the transport sector has become a critical imperative for public policy as our understanding of the impacts of the mobility system on the environment has developed. This paper contrasts policy development in three cities (Aberdeen, Bremen and Malmö) that collaborated as part of a European Union knowledge exchange programme designed to share innovative approaches to carbon reduction in the transport sector. We identify a number of critical aspects of governance, including the approach to policy formulation and implementation, and the status of consensus and cohesion, as key determinants of transport outcomes. We conclude that the degree of institutional alignment evident in each city’s governance network is crucial in explaining their appetite for the pursuit of low carbon policies, and in turn the real potential for policy transfer to occur as envisaged by European Union collaboration frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of community-based Transition Town initiatives in countries like the UK, USA and Canada is popularly perceived to represent a broad, socially inclusive and grounded approach to tackling environmental problems in place-based communities. In focusing on resilience as a core theme, so-called re-localisation initiatives attempt to adopt consensus based approaches to decision making and to highlight the need for an ‘inner transition’ of the self that encourages closer connections between individuals and nature. In this way, Transition has been framed as a new form of social and environmental movement that is re-casting community and political relations for a low carbon and post ‘Peak oil’ future. Yet despite these emergent philosophies of Transition and the considerable scholarship being generated on the role and success of such initiatives, there is an urgent need to situate and analyse Transition within broader understandings of environmental activism. Using data from a two year research project on ‘Values in Transition’, this paper argues that the praxis and spatial complexity of Transition can be understood more deeply through a narrative lens. In mobilising critical scholarship on environmental activism, the paper calls for a ‘Transition Geographies’ that views re-localisation as a dynamic and complex coalescence of competing narratives that sit between traditional forms of environmental activism and directive initiatives for individual behaviour change. As such, the paper highlights the ways in which this new form of environmental activism is shaping praxis across space, and the implications this has for those advocating re-localisation as a strategy for tackling climate change and resource scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy efforts to reduce the carbon intensity of domestic energy consumption have, over the last three decades, been dominated by an almost dichotomous reading of the relationship between technology and social change. On the one hand, there is a conception of personal responsibility that constructs domestic energy users as key actors in the adoption and (appropriate) use of low carbon energy technologies; from this perspective, environmental change becomes a matter of mobilising personal capacities such that individuals make better choices. On the other hand, decarbonising homes is conceived to be an outcome of top-down infrastructural interventions, with householders (or end users) positioned as relatively passive agents who will respond to engineered efficiency in linear and predictable ways. In practice, both positions have been found wanting in terms of accounting for how (and why) change happens and in turn delivering on ambitious policy goals. The argument we develop in this article goes beyond critiquing these problematic framings of technology and the locus of agency. Drawing on three contrasting low carbon energy technology projects in the UK, we present an alternative perspective which foregrounds a more experimental, ad hoc and ultimately provisional mode of governing with domestic energy technologies. We reflect on the meaning and political implications of this experimental turn in transforming (and decarbonising) domestic energy practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pivoting on the process of reserve replacement undertaken by key oil transnationals in Canada as a spatial fix for capital, the article considers how individual firms employ formal review processes to project their strategic interests. The proponent firm shapes, through its own participation, the regulatory terrain on which competitors will subsequently operate. In Alberta's tar sands, the oil industry's reserve replacement process serves as a spatial–temporal fix for capital, and the review process and tribunal acts as a complementary socio-ecological fix – restricting social/affective claims, including First Nations resistance, to an official tribunal setting. In seeking formal approval to replace declining oil and gas reserves with unconventionals, proponent firms claim investor security, while social movement opponents emphasize risk and insecurity arising from carbon-intensive, frontier extraction. In the case of the contested Shell Jackpine Mine Expansion Joint Review Panel, as in other environmental assessment processes in Alberta, the proponent firm and state representatives employ the oxymoronic term ‘resource sterilization’ to describe ecological protection. ‘Resource sterilization’ offers a discursive representation of how capital's spatio-temporal fix in unconventionals is facilitated through the terms of the formal review process, in which social claims are muted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a detailed empirical study of the implementation of the EU's Drinking Water Directive in Estonia and Lithuania in order to understand the factors shaping the Europeanisation of risk regulation regimes in Eastern accession states. Adopting a 'whole-regime' methodological approach, the paper explores the key drivers and constraints shaping the transposition as well as the practical implementation of the law. The study shows how 'conditionality' pressures to adopt the EU acquis in order to access European economic and financial support networks have reinforced, rather than overcome, historically entrenched regulatory cultures. Going beyond wellknown typologies of Europeanisation, the paper identifies a distinctive 'blind-eye' style of Europeanisation in which conditionality pressures have favoured selective compliance with ill-suited EU rules at the expense of tackling significant drinking water risk problems. The paper shows how such symbolic policy practices have been shaped through a combination of the countries' shared Soviet legacies of elite-centred and legalistic governance cultures, the active coping strategies of street-level inspectors, as well as wider sociopolitical contexts that have limited the impact of civil society actors such as scientists, NGOs, and the general public in strengthening risk regulation in the Baltic states. The paper also shows, however, that the different post-Soviet ideological orientations and administrative reform programmes of Eastern European accession states can override their common Soviet legacies and lead to significant national variation in risk regulation processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the case of the proposed Pondoland National Park in South Africa, which is in the center of policy debates about biodiversity conservation, development, and resource rights in the Wild Coast area of South Africa. It explores whether the making of the case for the conservation of the Wild Coast, which relies on global environmental discourses, has ideologically and practically clarified local poor people's resource rights. It does this by tracing the genealogy of the Pondoland National Park discourse, which originates from scientific research and individual and group lobbying, to help explain the disjuncture between post-apartheid environmental policy discourses and what takes place in practice. The paper concludes that the reliance on global environmental discourses in research done in support for the Pondoland National Park complicates the role of the nation-state in terms of environmental governance, and that this can negatively affect the poor and powerless residents of the area in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper that examines 'Measurementality' in the biodiversity governance ,which signifies the governance logic that emerges when transparency defines the effectiveness of neoliberal principles of conservation, in context to the functioning of the body Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. The topics discussed include global environmental governance, knowledge of economic relevance of biodiversity, and science policy.

Most 'progressive' Latin American governments, which have come to power over the past decade or so, continue to rely on agriculture and resource extraction as the primary generators of wealth. Scholars argue that this 'neoextractivism' is made politically possible by directing some profits toward the funding of progressive social programs. The Brazilian Amazon's vast wealth of extractive resources and its large economically depressed population make it the emblematic site for neoextractivism. Its biodiversity and inhabited landscapes, however, mean that the neoextractive program encounters concerted resistance from the global environmental community as well as from traditional, indigenous, and migrant smallholders. In response, neoextractivism must deploy another form of progressivism--environmentalism. The author uses the case of agroindustrial soy production in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará to demonstrate how the emergence of environmental governance there facilitates neoextractivism by 'greening' it. Through an analysis of the mechanisms and effects of two programs, implemented through partnerships between nongovernmental organizations and corporations, to manage soy expansion into the Amazon, it is demonstrated that these programs have questionable environmental benefits at best and at worst work to reenforce the hegemony of international environmental organizations, to green the image of agri-business multinationals, and to destabilize strategies of resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational certification and ecolabeling programs have become an important new site of environmental governance, as well as an emerging arena for action and conflict in international trade. This paper explores the implementation of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in salmon fisheries in the US state of Alaska in the early 2000s, the growing opposition within the industry to MSC certification through periods of reassessment, and the emergence of an alternative Alaska certification initiative in 2011. It suggests that these shifts were rooted in struggles over understudied third-party certification and labeling processes that we conceptualize as marketized governance. The paper further shows how certification and labeling can obscure and expose competing industry interests and power relations, provoke struggles over fisheries' social representation, and open up novel avenues for cooperation and change, indicating ambiguity in the social and cultural implications of neoliberal modes of governance. Finally, the paper suggests that the ascendancy of the MSC has sparked the emergence of new political and economic geographies of certification and ecolabeling in Alaska and other jurisdictions where place-specific and other initiatives vie for governance and market legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines geographies of environmental hazards in Accra, declared a Millennium City on I5 January 2010. With the aid of both primary and secondary data, it is shown how environmental governance has shifted under neoliberalism, and the author demonstrates how a review of Accra's waste disposal problems could elucidate how such paradigm shift has contributed to urban social injustice. Current practices are seen as a symptom of poor governance and the value of understanding intraurban differentials is interrogated. It is posited that the current representations as to who bears the brunt of any possible health-risk outcomes appear abstract, incomplete, and poorly understood. The author illustrates how ineffective and insufficiently attentive governance can exacerbate health risks facing the entire society, and suggests that addressing inequalities may be among the most effective interventions to ensure sustainable environmental management, improve health, and guarantee social cohesion in the urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the import for fiduciary investors (pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds in OECD countries) of companies' environmental performance levels in light of existing and nascent energy-usage and environmental management policies. The study is based on an experiment using a sample of fiduciaries located mainly in Europe, North America, and Australia. Subjects are allocated to one of two groups: one group invests with reference to environmental considerations, while the other tracks a conventional equities index. Responding participants indicate the frequency with which they use nominated sources of information and rate the importance of nominated types of information in their decisions concerning the portfolio. The results suggest that the wider population of fiduciaries considers existing policy measures to be of limited value, yet, on liquidity grounds, might be prepared to take environmental considerations into account in the portfolio construction process. Another contribution of this paper is its framing and consolidating of literature on energy and environmental management policy, environmental investing, and decision psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Municipal solid waste is a central concern for environmental policy, and the sociomateriality of waste--the ways in which waste is socially defi ned and dealt with--is an important issue for sustainability. We show how applying the European Union's waste policy through the European Waste Hierarchy (EWH) aff ects the sociomateriality of waste. The EWH ranks the desirability of diff erent waste-management approaches according to their environmental impact. We investigate how the EWH has been acknowledged and interpreted in fi ve diff erent organizational contexts with relevance for Swedish waste management: EU environmental policy, the Swedish EPA, two municipal wastemanagement companies, and the trade organization Swedish Waste Management which represents the interests of municipal bodies involved with waste. In addition to preventing the production of waste, the EWH aims to disassemble, circulate, and reintroduce as much material as possible into production processes. We show how these aims shape paradoxical relationships between economy and society on the one hand, and environment and nature on the other, and open the way for a discussion of a politics of consumption through material management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an increase in attention to 'geography' in civil war research, local dynamics in violence remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we analyze disaggregated violent event data for the North Caucasus of Russia from the start of the second Chechen war, in August 1999, to July 2010. We employ a diff usion perspective to examine the spread of the confl ict from its Chechen nucleus and we identify the tit-for-tat nature of the confl ict between the rebels and the military/police forces as especially signifi cant in understanding the confl ict's dynamics and spread to neighboring republics. A space-time analysis shows that violence is concentrated at short temporal intervals and geographic distances. As the insurgents in the violence have changed from dominantly nationalist to Islamist, the geography of the war has become more diff use across the Muslim republics of the region, rendering the Russian counterinsurgency eff orts more challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for fl ood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defi ning and communicating fl ood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, offi cial statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional confl icts over the use of the Environment Agency (EA) Flood Map to support decision making by English local planning authorities (LPAs), whose local political mandate, statutory obligations, and professionalized planning culture put them at odds with the narrower bureaucratic imperative of the Agency to restrict developments at risk of fl ooding. The paper shows how the Flood Map was designed to standardize and script the planning process and ensure that LPA decisions were aligned with EA views about avoiding development in zones at risk of fl ooding without actually banning such development outright. But technologies are also shaped by their users, and so the paper documents how planners accommodated and resisted this technology of indirect rule. Their concerns about sterilizing areas depicted as being at risk of fl ooding and about the diffi culties of actually using the Flood Map for speedy and defensible development-control decisions were crucial in its eventual replacement by a new decision-support technology, Strategic Flood Risk Assessments, which then led to the descripting of the Flood Map to infl uence a new set of users: the public. The paper closes with some wider refl ections on the signifi cance of the case for risk-based governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the rescaling of environmental governance, and with the social construction of environmental and governance scales in particular. With the aid of case-study data from Canada, it is argued that watersheds, as particular forms of rescaled environmental governance, have increased in popularity because of their status as boundary objects: that is, a common concept interpreted differently by different groups. The paper shows how particular features of the watershed approach-namely, their physical size and the shared discursive framings they employ ('stakeholder' and 'integration')- make the watershed concept both cohesive enough to travel among different epistemic communities, and plastic enough to be interpreted and used differently within them. As such, it is suggested that the trend of the uptake of the so-called 'watershed approach' reflects and is shaped by ideologies underpinned by three different, and occasionally competing, epistemic communities: the scientific, neoliberal, and grassroots communities. These arguments corroborate constructivist accounts of the political nature of boundary drawing, bring science into discussion on the relationship between neoliberalism and public participation, and contribute to environmental governance literatures by providing an alternative explanation for the uptake of watersheds in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation has become a mantra in environmental governance. However, there are signs that the participatory agenda has started to lose its momentum and justification because of disappointments about actual achievements. Rather than focusing on improving participatory processes or articulating best practices, in this paper we seek to understand the more fundamental reasons why difficulties are encountered. In our interviews with professionals involved in participation in environmental governance we found varying and potentially conflicting rationales for participation, with instrumental and legalistic rationales dominating. We contend that the institutional and political context in which this participation takes place is an important explanation of this prevalence. This includes the provisions for participation in EU directives, failing policy integration, institutional and political barriers, and failing political uptake of results from participation. We conclude there is a need for more reflexive awareness of the different ways in which participation is defined and practised in contemporary environmental policy making and for a more realistic assessment of possibilities for changes towards more participatory and deliberative decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has identified factors affecting local government (LG) adoption of Local Agenda 21 (LA21). The objective of this research is to propose a measurement model and test it in the case of a specific region, the Basque Country. Research results show that the embrace of LA21 by LOs is explained by internal characteristics of LG and factors associated with LG environment, which is fostered, fundamentally, by higher levels of government that can create connected or networking processes. The most relevant external factors are associated with a concept under-emphasised in previous sustainable development literature: cocreation. We propose that, to achieve generalised diffusion of LA21-type tools, we should emphasise cocreation in networks instead of networks in general. The measurement model used in this research could be used in other contexts as a means of confirming or refuting our results and offer politicians a guide for achieving a more generalised and robust diffusion of LA21 processes. This research contributes to LA21 and innovation-adoption literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emissions trading has created new forms of exchangeable property which become commodities when traded in markets designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigate climate change. This paper analyzes a set of social processes which influence who benefits from reductions in emissions generated by primary production from forest ecosystems. Informed by commodification literature, and property and access theory, we suggest that farmers and rural communities cannot derive full benefits from carbon sequestration because they lack key structural and relational mechanisms, such as capital, knowledge, expertise, technology, and, in some cases, even labour. We illustrate this argument by examining three ongoing carbon-forestry projects in China, Ecuador, and Mexico and we highlight its implications for future forestry mitigation projects and programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of environmental governance in Russia, using the concept of ecological modernization as an analytical framework for an empirical study. From an investigation into both the relationship between economic growth and environmental stress on the basis of the revised model of decoupling and the development of institutional capacity for environ- mental policy in recent years, this paper reveals that Russia's pathway to ecological modernization is now 'closed' in most spheres owing to the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union; this is in contrast to China's experience, wherein ecological modernization has been 'forced' as a national policy. Russia is considered to be a typical case of failure of realization of industrial restructuring leading to a relative reduction in environmental stress in a centrally planned economy. Moreover, the country's hyper depression since the introduction of a market economy has hindered the search for a pathway to medium-term and long-term ecological modernization, which has been exchanged for short-term 'ecological improvement without environmental policy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the controversy over airport-generated noise at Brussels Airport as an environmental issue on the national political agenda coincided with the inauguration of Belgium's first `purple-green' government in 1999. The new government announced explicitly the dawning of a new political age in which old controversies and adversarial left-right politics were relegated to the dustbin of history. From now onwards, the interests of market actors, environmental concerns, and social objectives would be negotiated and reconciled in the interest of all within the framework of a common and consensually agreed objective of achieving environmentally sustainable, socially inclusive, and market-based development. The controversy over DHL's night flights at Brussels Airport would prove to be one of the first real test cases of this 'Third Way' postpolitical approach to policing socioenvironmental affairs. However, after several years of acrimonious argument, successive attempts to negotiate a compromise with all relevant partners, and increasingly more entrenched antagonistic dispute, DHL abandoned Brussels Airport as its main European hub. This sequence belied the initial optimism of the government's postpolitical approach and, we argue in this paper, stands emblematically for the failure of such postpolitical modes of policing socioenvironmental affairs. The objective of this paper is to explore, both theoretically and empirically, the contradictions and tensions associated with the postpolitical model. First, we situate theoretically the emergence and consolidation of postpolitical modes of governing and the colonisation of the space of the political by forms of consensual depoliticised governance. Second, we shall analyse how urban socioenvironmental governance procedures associated with the problem of noise at Brussels Airport express the attempts to institute postdemocratic modes of governance, while exploring the contradictions of this model. In addition, the failure of postdemocratic and postpolitical arrangements is discussed, and an urgent need to repoliticise urban socioecological relations is argued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short and deliberately provocative paper I reflect on what seems to be a yawning gulf between the potential contribution of the social sciences and the typically restricted models and concepts of social change embedded in contemporary environmental policy in the UK, and in other countries too. As well as making a strong case for going beyond what I refer to as the dominant paradigm of 'ABC'—attitude, behaviour, and choice—I discuss the attractions of this model, the blind spots it creates, and the forms of governance it sustains. This exercise provides some insight into why so much relevant social theory remains so marginalised, and helps identify opportunities for making better use of existing intellectual resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainforest blanketing the central and north coasts of British Columbia. But this essay takes a different cut into understanding this particular political event, in that it tracks an often-unrecognized actor through the politics there: the grizzly bear. Drawing inspiration from scholarship that challenges the primacy of humans in our understandings of politics and social life, I argue that the grizzly bear influences and inflects BC's coastal forest politics; it is an important player in the transformation of the Great Bear Rainforest. I tell the story of environmental politics there by tracing the grizzly bear's shifting relationships with others, including with settlers, conservation biologists, environmentalists and money, all of which are consequential for the grizzly bear, and for others in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the diversity and vitality of waste scholarship. It cites an issue indicating that waste scholarship is moving to a fuller engagement with materiality. It argues that the waste in the social sciences has been the primary concern of environmental policy and urban planning, while stuff and its treatment remain the preserve of the technical engineering. It contends that works to locate waste policy research remove all end-of-pipe policies.

Research suggests that people living in deprived areas of the UK are more likely to be exposed to hazardous environments than those in more affluent areas, but the mechanism behind this trend is not clear. Discrimination in the siting of undesirable land uses has often been blamed, leading to claims of environmental injustice. However, environmental inequalities may also arise through post-siting processes that lead to selective migration: the presence of an undesirable land use may devalue local property, encouraging affluent households to move away and deprived households to move in to surrounding areas. Ascertaining the underlying process at work is important as this has significant implications for guiding policies aimed at delivering environmental justice. We investigated the distribution of municipal landfill sites in Scotland and local exposure to their airborne emissions. Geographical information system techniques were used to construct a wind-weighted, emissions-weighted, and distance-weighted model with which small-area exposure to landfills could be classified. This model gave the exposure classification a degree of realism not generally incorporated in similar studies. We found clear evidence of environmental inequality: socially deprived areas of Scotland are disproportionately exposed to municipal landfills and have been since at least 1981. We then asked which came first, the deprivation or the landfill? Our results suggest that both disproportionate siting and postsiting market dynamics may play a role: area deprivation may have preceded disproportionate landfill siting to some extent, particularly in the 1980s, but landfill siting also preceded a relative increase in deprivation in exposed areas. Areas that became exposed to a municipal landfill in the 1980s were subsequently 1.65 times more likely to be classified as deprived by 2001 than areas that remained unexposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy conservation is a critical policy for China to achieve its economic growth objective within its resource and environmental constraints. I develop a nonlinear programming model to simulate a promising policy instrument-an interregional energy-conservation-quota trading system. A multivariate statistical approach is applied to identify an appropriate regional classification to aggregate provinces of China into trading regions. As with most energy and environmental policies in large countries, implementation will have to take place at the regional level. I show that delineating regions on the basis of socioeconomic and energy-environment characteristics would enable the conservation-quota trading system to function in a more efficient and equitable manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses aspects regarding the reasons for concern on climate change adaptation. It states that the reasons for concern were updated in the 2009 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which discussed the risks of large-scale discontinuities to ecosystems. He notes that the freshwater availability in coastal areas will suffer from sea level rise. It adds that the measures should be well-addressed in the environmental policies.

Under a new nationalist leadership, the Scottish Government has recently increased its renewable energy targets but rejected a controversial large windfarm proposal on the Isle of Lewis. This paper explores the nature of support and opposition to windfarm developments on Lewis. In doing so, we build on recent literature which has promoted a discursive approach to wind energy debates, to enable a more explanatory, rather than descriptive, analysis. A novel combination of Q methodology and more conventional qualitative work is deployed to identify and elaborate five distinct discourses on the Lewis Wind proposal. Each displays a different rationality and set of priorities on the economy, landscape, and environment, and ultimately represents a different vision of development in the Western Isles. The paper explores the challenges that such a clash of values presents to the planning process and reflects upon what can be learnt about deliberative planning from this case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the built environment, physical activity, and well-being is currently attracting concerted government attention in the UK which has been formalized through new sets of urban planning and design guidelines. In light of this, the author argues that the domains of intersection between the physical environment and governmental health and social agendas need further exploration. Furthermore, she asserts that urban geographers are theoretically and empirically well placed to undertake valuable and much needed research agendas within these domains. To explore these assertions, the author first sets out the recent turn to physical activity as an explicit policy concern. She then critically interrogates two recent sets of design guidelines, Active Design (Sport England) and the 2008 NICE guidance within the context of current UK policy thinking, before exploring the problematic nature of the instrumental readings of space they present. It is argued that this instrumental rationale may sanction the neglect of the intrinsic value and importance of active lives themselves to urban spaces, which, it is asserted, can have marked impacts on wellbeing. An appreciation of this opens up new geographical research agendas with respect to the built form, public health, and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, a multilateral environmental agreement, has successfully eliminated the use of most ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. As a result, a number of observers have pointed to the possibility of transferring successes-and even linking regulations-between the Montreal Protocol and Kyoto Protocol, the international but stalled climate-change agreement. We argue that there is need for caution on this issue. The Montreal and Kyoto protocols are the outcomes of vastly different political contexts, from public civil society approaches to what we call 'the private turn': the current loss of faith in state sovereignty, the rejection of multilateralism, and an embrace of private knowledge about economic damage over public knowledge about the protection of citizens and natural resources. From this broader perspective we show that the differences between the Montreal and Kyoto protocols are therefore more than `command-and-control' versus `market-based' solutions. These differences also reflect an even deeper divide over what `counts' as knowledge in political decision-making processes. We illustrate these points through a case study of the current knowledge controversies around the phase-out of methyl bromide under the Montreal Protocol. We explain how the methyl bromide phase-out has stalled because the phase-out approach is incompatible with the current political regime, thus supporting the argument that neoliberal forms of governance cannot solve global environmental problems. This case, therefore, shows us that the challenges we face are more than atmospheric: to save the Earth we must create new ways to govern ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The carbon economy has emerged over the last decade as an important but controversial development in the harnessing of economics to address the challenge of climate change. In this paper we utilise the concepts of policy change and transition theorisations to analyse carbon commodification within the broader range of possible responses to the climate problem. We argue that the neoliberal, technocentric, and ecological modernisation values underpinning the carbon economy create serious obstacles for the incorporation of alternative or complementary transitional strategies, particularly those involving ecocentric changes, into mainstream policy. From this we contend that a more holistic approach to the conceptualisation of change processes is needed, and that transition theory provides a useful lens for identifying and assessing existing constraints and future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on urban sustainability has now been on the research agenda for a number of years. One element that has, however, been undertheorized and empirically understudied is the crucial importance of networked urban infrastructures for the ecological sustainability of cities. These infrastructures mediate resource flows and vitally shape environmental practices and sociotechnical innovation in cities. It is thus argued that we need adequate conceptual approaches which reflect the complex interdependencies between cities, networked infrastructures, and urban ecologies and which broaden our understanding of the ways we can develop, govern, and renew our infrastructures in cities in a sustainable way. Scrutinizing the relevant debates both in technology studies and in urban studies, the author reveals that none of the theoretical approaches discussed seems entirely suitable for conceptualizing these interdependencies and the requirements for the sustainable redesign of urban infrastructures. The author shows, however, how urban and technology studies might inspire, complement, and benefit each other in conceptualizing the urban political ecology of networked infrastructures. Combining elements of the different analytical approaches, it is argued, could create new opportunities for the empirical study of infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 September 2006 UK über-entrepreneur and Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson pledged approximately £1.6 billion, the equivalent of all the profits from Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains for the next ten years, to fighting climate change. Since then, Branson has restated his commitment to action on global warming, including investment in technologies for sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this paper, I critically examine and engage with Branson's announcements as a specific entrée into a dialog about so-called 'green capitalism'. I am particularly interested in the role of the entrepreneurial subject in environmental policy and environmental action. There are glaring problems associated with green capitalism as a mash-up of environmentalism with capitalism. One of these is the tethering of environmentalism to a political economy whose mantra is growth for growth's sake, or, in Marx's terms, accumulation for accumulation's sake. This has been discussed by some as the problem of capitalism's ecological metabolism or 'metabolic rift'. Yet, while accumulation for accumulation's sake may well be anathema to progressive environmentalism and sustainability, I argue that this is not only an objective, quantitative problem but also one of the qualitative dimensions of produced nature and the cultural politics of environmentalism. Appreciation of this can be gleaned by reexamining Marx's discussion of the role of the bourgeois subject in the relentless drive to reproduce and expand capital accumulation via anarchic, entrepreneurial investment. Green capitalist orthodoxy relies on this source of innovative dynamism, but in the process obscures or overlooks the fact that accumulation for accumulation's sake is by definition guided by the anarchic and amoral search for profitable realization of surplus value. Moreover, in order for green capitalism to succeed, its legitimacy must be secured. I argue that this legitimacy derives in part from specific performances of green capitalism by entrepreneurial elites, also made evident by Branson and his commitments to climate action. All of this raises questions about the political, cultural, and ecological character of green capitalism, issues brought to the fore by Branson's brand of climate activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the continued utility of research into the social production of scale in relation to the politics of natural-resource distribution, ownership, and control. While traditionally oriented toward sociospatial theory and urban governance, research has begun to convey the importance of scale as a discursive framing device at the center of multiple kinds of environmental politics. Our approach draws from recent literature to show the material-discursive `difference that nature makes' in constituting the grounds of scalar struggle in mineral development. We argue that the fixity of certain natural-resource deposits and the concomitant local socioecological impact of extraction stands in stark contradiction to the multiscalar forces that vie over their development. Our central argument is that this contradiction ensures that struggles over natural- resource development are necessarily struggles over scale-the scale of ownership and the scale of distributional benefits and costs. The politics of natural resources must be couched in scalar terms and those who gain access to resources must build stable institutional-scatar platforms for the production of resource wealth. We illustrate this through an analysis of US Congressional debate over reform of the infamous `1872 Mining Law' in 1993 as an exemplary moment of scalar politics. In this case, we not only attempt to show how the concept of scale frames these debates, but also how the failure to reform the 19th-century law allowed for the institutional materialization of particular scalar conduits for capital accumulation in the mining sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideal of environmental justice is a far reach for Israel, a country with severely limited land area, an overriding concern with security, and a significant minority population. Nevertheless, it is urgent that policy makers take steps in that direction, both for the health of the nation and for moral rightness. After a survey of theoretical approaches to environmental justice, the author offers an operative definition and theory appropriate to the Israeli situation. This approach, embodying all facets of the theory, is applied to a case study of the Arab town of Sachnin, and the policy implications that it indicates are explored. Specific steps that could help progress toward the ultimate goal of environmental justice are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critique of inherent flaws in today's growth-driven natural capitalism argues its key contradictions and basic conflicts can be typified by the cultural politics and political economy found in the environmental advocacy of Al Gore Jr, especially in his Nobel Prize winning activities on global climate change in works like An Inconvenient Truth. In such criticism he aims neither to dismiss the dangers of global climate change nor to derogate the findings of ongoing scientific research, like that done by the co-awardees of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, namely, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Rather, it is meant to begin a more pointed reassessment of how today's global climate-change debates are too entwined in the reproduction of most existing power relations and global market exchange. At best, Gore's work seems essentially to 'greenwash' existing networks of corporate organization and expert technocracy with renewed institutional legitimacy that only rinses today's unsustainable economic status quo in the refreshing, but not fully cleansing, waters of sustainable development ideology. While there is a need for systemic reforms in economic production, government regulation, technological innovation, and social distribution to mitigate climate change, Gore's many engagements with big business, venture capital, and global media do not appear to offer such a radical transformation. Instead, his basic project of decarbonizing the commodity chain mainly would appear to be a new program for further economic development that might not even retard, much less fully reverse, current climate-change trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the challenges of building pathways to Sustainability in the context of contested knowledge and power relations in environment and development. Drawing on two case studies concerning tropical forests in West Africa and the Caribbean, it explores clashes between the conceptions of social — ecological systems embedded in dominant scientific and policy practices, and the more dynamic, nonequilibrial perspectives that emerge from understandings of forest history and users' own experiences. Forest and conservation policy, I find, have persistently ignored these dynamics. Yet, as people and nature have 'bitten back', forest histories are revealed as mutually constituting interplays of ecological process, social practice, policy and intervention, and response. Policy makers often do not see this, and are thus surprised when their schemes fail. In this paper, I argue that alternative analytical approaches are needed that take seriously human — ecological dynamics, history, path dependency, and the ways in which different people frame or construct problems, linked with notions of Sustainability that respect diverse goals-including forest users' own. This, in turn, suggests the need for alternative approaches to the governance of environment and development issues that are more adaptive, deliberative, and reflexive, and for politically engaged efforts to institute these in contexts where pervasive power-knowledge relations perpetuate less dynamic views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide, metropolitan areas continue to be confronted by a growing number of increasingly difficult planning issues. It is our experience that planning practitioners have not taken full advantage of what the Delphi technique can contribute to making informed choices in a wide variety of decision and policy environments. The objectives of this paper are to describe and explain the research design that supported a real-world application of the Delphi technique in an urban, regional, and ecosystem- based planning context, as well as to demonstrate how this model has been or can be adapted to serve a variety of planning research or application tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated, collaborative governance arrangements are viewed as answering the limitations of the liberal, democratic state in the face of 'wicked' policy dilemmas such as environmental degradation. The nature of institutional resistance to governance experiments, however, has received limited attention. This paper explores a case of such resistance by the New South Wales political system: the decision to disband the Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment Management Trust. This discontinuation of the administrative coordination and community engagement aimed at restoring the health of Sydney's major river system is herein characterised as a deliberative truncation. Discussion of what would constitute constructive ecological institutional and policy settings was cut short by intolerant notions of efficacy sustained by political/administrative routines. Analysis of this truncation is progressed through a nexus between three mutually informative theories of modernity dealing with the policy challenges facing liberal democratic societies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the main limitations and difficulties in the efficiency argument of ecological modernization. Eight limitations in the concept of eco-efficiency are revealed. Recommendations to improve the use of eco-efficiency in ecological modernization policy and management are derived from the critique. Eco-efficiency serves as an important technical tool, practical instrument, or indicator in environmental policy and management, but is not suitable as the overall goal and strategic vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental performance is a matter of major concern both for policy makers and for firm managers. In this paper we interpret firms' environmental performance as their ability to reduce polluting wastes while maintaining observed levels of inputs and desirable outputs. Making use of data envelopment analysis techniques, we compute waste-specific environmental efficiency measures for a sample of ceramic-tile producers located in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia. Our results show that there exists substantial room for improving environmental performance, which would have highly beneficial consequences for the local environment. In a second stage of analysis, we find that affiliation to the regional Technological Institute, ITC, which aims to promote technological innovation within the ceramic-tile industry, improves tile firms' environmental efficiency. In addition, firms located in the local industrial district of the Plana Baixa enjoy what we have broadly defined as ‘environmental spillovers’, which enhance their environmental performance. Also, ceramic-tile firms which outsource the management of wastes show better environmental performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the outdoor environment provides older people with various opportunities to enhance their quality of life (QOL), few studies have investigated the extent to which this environment is influential in practice. In order to enable empirical research on this topic, in this paper we propose and examine the concept of environmental support. On the basis of a review of recent literature in gerontology, public health, environmental psychology, landscape architecture, and urban design, we argue that the supportiveness of neighbourhood environments that make outdoor activity (eg, walking) easy and enjoyable is conducive to a better QOL for older people. We introduce three ways of conceptualising environmental support focusing on the following: personally meaningful outdoor activities, environmental attributes found relevant to people's activities, and unmet needs for daily activities. Several conceptual frameworks that incorporate environmental support, QOL and other potentially salient constructs are also presented. We suggest possible future research directions employing this concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relationship between state-oriented and neoliberal approaches to environmental regulation by examining simultaneous efforts to protect the endangered Steller sea lion and to privatize the fishery for Alaska pollock. Because these policies were designed and implemented at the same time and for the same industry, this case offers a unique opportunity to explore in detail not transitions from one type of policy regime to another but, rather, how these different policy regimes articulate. Rather than focusing on reregulation which occurs when neoliberal restructuring shifts away from traditional regulation while simultaneously developing new, market-oriented forms of regulation, this paper focuses on a different kind of reregulation which occurs when state-oriented and market-oriented approaches must coexist. Analysis of how regulators themselves write about the conjunction of these policies reveals that the two forms of regulation can be complementary. To the extent that neoliberal restructuring has environmental benefits, these are mediated through traditional environmental protections, and although restructuring is presented as a means of mitigating the negative economic effects of state-oriented regulation, these effects are quite consistent with the goals of restructuring. Further, this analysis also reveals the power of neoliberal discourse. Despite their own statements about the complex articulation of the policies, regulators attribute benefits to privatization and problems to state-oriented regulation. This case highlights the inability of neoliberalism to subsume its outsides—alternatives are already existing—but also highlights that these outsides can themselves come to support what they seem to oppose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the effect of sustainable transition management to the society. He pointed that the way to contend environmental crises is through fundamental changes in the socio-technological structure of the way individuals live and work. The author relates the topic to the adopted methods of transition management under a government-sponsored programs in the Netherlands and in Great Britian. He pointed on how transition management creates social systemic change and affects technology.

In the growing field of urban political ecology, so far not much attention has been paid to air-quality and related policies. In this paper I examine the recent far-reaching air-pollution policies in India's capital, as well as the role of environmental nongovernmental organizations and judicial activism, in view of their implications for different groups of the urban population. I analyze these policies in the wider context of Delhi's ongoing strive for ‘city beautification’ and for changing (environmental) governmentalities, and reveal a marked middle-class bias in the environmental and judicial activisms practised, which also contributes to the refining of the boundary between public and private environments. Furthermore, it is argued that air quality with its complex sociospatial patterns plays a significant part in the coproduction of urban ‘socioenvironments’ that needs to be addressed in political-ecological studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the role of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in debates about environmental science and knowledge, using empirical evidence from in-depth interviews with a range of NGOs involved in the waste debate in the United Kingdom. We discuss theoretical issues of scientific boundary-work and the construction of expertise and socially distributed knowledge, and then apply these to our empirical evidence. Our conclusions are that NGOs continue to subscribe to the notion of the preeminent authority of science in environmental debates, but also work partly in a more diverse, highly networked world of knowledge production which requires them to be pragmatic and versatile in how they legitimate knowledge from various sources. Hence, scientific knowledge is highly contingent in its authority, and dependent upon continual (re)negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors draw upon survey evidence of expert conceptualisations of the value of public knowledge in environmental decisionmaking. In the context of local air quality management in particular, they consider how experts understand the potential benefits of technological citizenship, and what status they accord to lay knowledge relative to their own roles. Evidence suggests a continuing expert-deficit model of lay knowledge, with suspicions that the public misunderstand environmental issues. Although the need for public ‘buy-in’ to the solutions to problems such as air pollution is supported, this does not translate to a more proactive engagement of lay knowledge in the assessment of such issues. Experts seem to be personally challenged by such notions. The authors discuss the need for a cultural shift in expert understanding of the value of lay knowledge, supported by a move away from an oversimplification of the need for, and value of, public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]