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Much has been said about the need and benefits of consensus building for resolving disagreements about water and environmental management. Less has been said about how to better convene and facilitate those processes. This paper focuses on the latter, examining the challenges and breakthroughs encountered when decision-makers convene consensus building processes that seek an agreement among stakeholders who believe they have “apparently irreconcilable differences.” The research described here analyzes two multi-stakeholder, collaborative processes convened by the CALFED Bay-Delta Program (CALFED) on the issue of agricultural water use efficiency in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds of California. The first process made very little progress; however, stakeholder representatives in the second were able to forge an agreement that included significant innovation and surprising risk taking by all sides. Analyzing the two processes, this paper shows that the stakeholders, conveners, and facilitators in these processes had to do much more than make the discrete trades across interests envisioned in consensus building theory or reframing as described in theories about conflict and frames. Looking at the data, this paper shows how several concepts from outside consensus building—including boundary objects and interlanguage—along with less well-known concepts and issues within the consensus building literature—bricolage and representation—can provide insights into how the Steering Committee accomplished what it did. This paper introduces these additional concepts, how they mattered in this CALFED process, and suggests a complex set of interrelated insights into how future collaborative and integrative environmental programs can approach the most difficult environmental policy and management conflicts.

Whether a new policy is adapted to a new social-ecological reality depends on the complex interactions that play out from the policy process itself. The established theories of the policy process do not directly or explicitly address the actors' ability to influence. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing a model of actors' capacity to influence (an actor-centered perspective) which allows us to analyze the casual relationship between actors' influencing capacity and its effects on policy decision-making. This paper provides an in-depth study of the 2010 Brazilian Solid Waste Policy, a policy process characterized by high conflict that took almost 20 years to be approved by Brazilian Congress. It maps the actors' capacity of influence over the course of ten years to understand how this influence is related to policy dynamics (change and stability) and policy contents (policy instruments adopted). The study involves document analyses and interviews with relevant stakeholders. The findings identify the important role of influential actors in causing moments of paralysis and in fostering instrumental design. The insights on actors' capacity of influence and its effects contribute to our understanding of the complex dynamics of the environmental policy process.

As a tool to regulate environmental issues, standards play a key role in defining acceptable levels of safety and environmental protection. From a governance perspective, standards are also significant for their inclusion of non-governmental stakeholders, including industry and environmental organizations, in determining the benchmarks upon which policies are enacted. Drawing upon work on Israeli standards for both environmental pollutants in consumer products and ‘green building’, this paper considers how the use of standards as an environmental policy tool affects how environmental issues are regulated. The research uses written standards, research into standardisation committees and approximately twenty in-depth interviews. Thematic analysis of the use of these standards as environmental policy tools highlighted different issues including the connection between representation of different interests and availability of resources; different rationales for standards that may produce conflict in professional decisions; and implications of the consensus-building approach for balancing interests and driving government policy. We conclude that various factors ought to be taken into account when using standards within environmental policy. We provide policy recommendations including a need to consider the implications of using a standard in the absence of broader regulation; the impact of economic and pragmatic rationales on environmental and health measures in standards; and means to improve the balance of representatives on standards committees.

• This paper discusses how EPI lessons can be applicable to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs.

The aim of this paper is to clarify the magnitude of the sub-optimization cost associated with separate control strategies for compliance with the Swedish environmental quality objectives. The marginal reduction costs are estimated using a separate and an integrated version of a deterministic linear programming model. To investigate whether the accuracy of the data is decisive for the result of this study, an extensive sensitivity analysis that deals with both the disparity in discount rates in data and the different types of measures, is carried out in four steps. It can be concluded that the results are robust for possible and probable faults in data. The main findings are that there are no substantial sub-optimization costs for separate control strategies for CO2, NOX and SO2, but an integrated action strategy could imply enhanced cost-efficiency in reductions of VOC and particles.

The idea of integration in research has risen rapidly in both environmental science and public environmental policy since the mid-1990s, and has encouraged innovative relationships between scientists and practitioners in a range of contexts. Yet the concept of integration is broad and ambiguous, which inhibits efforts to learn from these innovations. In this paper, I review the different concepts of integration that currently exist in international and Australian science and environmental policy contexts. Drawing on comprehensive examples, I identify 12 thematic categories of integration. The themes encompass integration within science, as well as integration between scientific and non-scientific partners. They also include integration focused on activities, and on the organisational or institutional structures that govern research activity. These groupings reflect significant differences in the ways science–policy relationships are understood, and the main problems integration is intended to overcome. They serve as a foundation for a framework that researchers, policy-makers and other partners can use to compare and learn from different integrative research approaches. This is a first step towards building a comprehensive understanding of how integration can contribute to better environmental outcomes.