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Scholarly work in the field of legal geography has grown dramatically in recent decades. While much legal geography scholarship has been influenced by a European-North American perspective, we argue that a distinctive legal geography scholarship also emanates from outside the dominant perspective. Here, we review research from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa and label this work as Antipodean legal geography (ALG). We suggest ALG research has made a significant contribution to global legal geography scholarship through an emphasis on environmental law and policy problem solving and through efforts to de-colonialise and expand legal geography's remit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) serve as a neoliberal performative act, in which idealized conditions are re-constituted by well-resourced and networked epistemic communities with the objective of bringing a distinctly instrumental and utilitarian relationality between humans and nature into existence. We illustrate the performative agency of hegemonic epistemic communities advocating (P)ES imaginaries to differentiate between the cultural construction of an ideal reality, which can and always will fail, and an external reality of actually produced effects. In doing so, we explore human agency to disobey performative acts to craft embodied and life-affirming relationships with nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are growing calls for social network analysis methods to be more extensively deployed in environmental governance practice. A key claim is that social network analysis can generate knowledge to build trust, enable consensus, and facilitate the dissemination of information necessary to make environmental protection ‘successful’. By bringing social network analysis into dialogue with heterodox social theories relevant to human geographers and cognate social scientists, this article destabilizes such claims. It is argued that the current application of social network analysis enacts a particular moral and political emphasis on resilience and participation, which readily works with the grain of hegemonic environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to a recent call for geographers to engage with the ecosystem services concept which is an increasingly dominant global model for environmental policy and management. We focus on its economic exchange mechanism, payment for environmental services (PES), and reject the conventional notion of it as either an economic or an environmental strategy. Rather than treating a disaggregated nature as the ‘fixed stock’ of ecosystem services, we value instead actual human and non-human interrelations and practices and focus on how we might reconfigure the socio-cultural relations between people and nature as the valued stock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the environmental dimensions of rescaling. Specifically, it explores debates around centralization and decentralization, introduces a key distinction between rescaling to jurisdictional spaces and ecosystem spaces, and suggests three future research trajectories: (1) analytical clarification of the differences between rescaling to natural versus jurisdictional scales; (2) examination of rescaling in light of its attendant process of creating new objects of governance; and (3) investigation of rescaling processes through a temporal lens, with the suggestion that rescaled environmental governance may be the site of some of the first and last manifestations of neoliberal governance reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosystem services in geography by exploring the internal heterogeneity and tensions within the world of ecosystem service policies. In describing these debates on their own terms, we find a diverse and wide-ranging set of actors and viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, scholars have noted a broadening of environmental justice research, both geographically and conceptually, to include global issues that expand beyond the spatial distributions of environmental ‘goods' and ‘bads' to include other dimensions including recognition, participation, and capabilities. The purpose of this report is to consider how this broadening has influenced research topics and themes, the geographic locations of researchers, and the future course of environmental justice research. We searched for articles identifying environmental justice as a keyword from 2000 to 2009 in Scopus, Web of Science, and GeoBase. While the number of articles published looking at environmental justice has increased over the past decade, our search contradicts the previous claims that environmental justice research has greatly expanded conceptually or geographically beyond its traditional origins. Our findings show that environmental justice research remains firmly rooted in the United States, focusing on the distributional aspects of environmental harms. We introduce alternative research methodologies that can be used to inform a more holistic and just approach to research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the need to develop a conceptual approach that moves away from dichotomous thinking about pro-environmental behaviour by considering the meso level of reality, through which macro level change can be observed and micro level activity can be contextualized. The discussion reviews pro-environmental behaviour literatures, presenting an alternative conceptual approach that incorporates the importance of scale and the social units to which people belong. In particular, the paper argues that greater understanding of the household, as a unit within the meso level, offers an opportunity to rethink the future research agenda for the study of pro-environmental behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issues related to the various aspects of political ecology. It has been stated that the dominant expression of political ecology has shown a remarkable lack of politics. Political ecology aims to address social-environmental concerns but, its lack of politics has led to environmental problems. It added that there is no ethical clarity of political ecology's methods and practices. Details related to the challenges, achievements, and possibilities in political ecology are discussed.

This article seeks to unpack notions of governmentality by reading it through the case of nature. By highlighting three key aspects of governmentality - its analytics of power, biopolitics, and technologies of the self - I argue that this approach presents a promising theoretical trend for those who study nature and its rule. However, there have been critiques leveled at this approach which must be considered. Using examples drawn from human/non-human interactions, I explore how the governmentality literature needs to be made more complex and attune to difference. In the final analysis, I argue that the concept of governmentality is not only an effective tool for geographers, but that geography provides a particularly insightful lens with its attention to spatiality, scale, territory and human/non-human relations that enrich the analysis of the making of governable spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the environmental issues inherent in geography. Correlation between political economy and geography; Economic policies that influence the condition of the environment.

Geography finally seems to be taking the environment, and particularly nature, seriously in conceptual terms. Stimulated not least by accounts of nature developed by William Cronon and Bruno Latour, and the continued ‘cultural turn’ more generally, articles and indeed whole journals have begun to consider the geographical implications of rethinking nature. Despite Williams’ (1998: 29) claim that the social construction of nature and the environment is now ‘an accepted concept that needs little elaboration, though it still fascinates’, elaboration is in. In this short report, I shall comment on the main themes this elaboration is pursuing and also how this has been criticized as potentially damaging to environmental protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on G.F. White's evaluation of national flood policies in the U.S. Structural approaches to floods; Ways to encourage wise use of floodplains; Implications for geography.