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Governments are facing increasingly complex policy challenges, ranging from climate change, demographic pressures, rising inequalities and discontent, to the global health crisis that countries are presently confronting. Successful responses require more integrated approaches to policy making at all levels of government, so that economic, social and environmental actions reinforce each other rather than compete. They also require effective coordination across levels of government to manage shared responsibilities, mutual dependence and common challenges. This commentary highlights the progress in the multi-level governance concept since its first use, and focuses on some current dynamics driving multi-level governance, in particular the trend towards differentiated subnational governance. It then highlights that the way multi-level governance systems are designed has a direct impact on policy outcomes, hence the imperative to strengthen multi-level governance systems. The commentary offers insight into how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is tacking this imperative to best support countries in their development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a relationship between established democratic political systems and environmental capacity has been described, the impact of the democratisation process on environmental capacity is not clear. The aim of this article is to determine the effect of both prior regime type and mode of transition on environmental capacity, through consideration of the cases of Bulgaria, Portugal, Romania and Spain. In addition, the importance of the European Union ( EU) as an external actor shaping environmental capacity building is assessed. Findings indicate that variations in prior regime type and mode of transition had limited impact on environmental capacity development. Of greater importance were the persistent non-democratic legacies that influenced behaviours and actions during the democratisation period. The requirements of the EU were fundamental in ensuring that environmental issues remained on the domestic political agenda in such a context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Commitment to Development Index has been developed to assess seven policy areas of rich countries that affect the development of poor countries and to rank the rich countries from this perspective. This article aims to analyze the environmental component of this index. The environmental dimension is a legitimate part of the concept behind the index because preserving global environmental resources is essential for the future development prospects of poorer countries. The operationalization of the dimension, however, gives rise to several issues, such as the combination of policy and practice indicators, data availability and credibility, and other specific aspects that affect the information value of individual indicators and the component as a whole. Acknowledging the difficulty of constructing such a component, we suggest several options for its modification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with recent work in political ecology that explores the ways in which scale is imbricated in environmental governance. Specifically, we analyze the deployment of specific ecological scales as putatively 'natural' governance units in rescaling processes. To undertake this analysis, the paper brings two sets of literature into dialogue: (1) political ecology of scale and (2) political economy of rescaling, drawing on theories of uneven development. Building on this literature, we develop the concept of an eco- scalar fix and explore its analytical potential through a case study of the rescaling of water governance in Alberta, Canada. We argue that although the 'eco-scalar fix' is usually framed as an apolitical governance change—particularly through the framing of particular scales (ie, the watershed) as 'natural'—it is often, in fact, a deeply political move that reconfigures power structures and prioritizes some resource uses over others in ways that can entrench, rather than resolve, the crises it was designed to address. Moreover, we suggest that, although watershed governance is often discursively depicted as an environmental strategy (eg, internalizing environmental externalities by aligning decision making with ecological boundaries), it is often articulated with—and undertaken to address challenges that arise through—processes of uneven development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This year marks the 40th year of Africana Studies in the academy, and while great gains have been made, there is one glaring area of study absent from the field—the environment. Given that African peoples globally suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation as well as the role that the burgeoning “Green Jobs” sector could have in engendering job growth in the Black community, the environment should play a role in Africana Studies programs and research. This article showcases the absence of an environmental focus in both Black scholarly research and Africana Studies programs—and other academic programs—across the country. Given the important role that the environment plays in the Black community and could continue to play in the near future, this article advocates for the necessity of an environmental focus within the field of Africana Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

The article presents abstract on planning including a micro-level analysis of the Black voting during the civil rights movement, the influence of land-use planners on flood hazard mitigation and the use on public transport timetable data into health care accessibility modelling.

The article presents abstracts on various topics which include social life and civic education in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the political aspect of neighborhood football clubs in Santiago, Chile and the legacy of urban renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.

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]

Modern states increasingly rely on two means of regulating markets: public regulation (by the government) and private self-regulation (by the firms themselves). This study assesses the evolution of the state toward co-regulation by examining, across countries, the incidence of a prominent type of self-regulation: the environmental protection standard ISO 14001. It focuses on technological capabilities as a precursor to the widespread adoption of ISO 14001. Just as technological progress helps to explain differences in economic growth, markets with greater technological attainment (specifically, general purpose technologies) arguably have greater firm-level adoption of self-regulation practices. According to panel data, ISO 14001 is more widespread in countries with greater technological capabilities, but there are diminishing returns to the impact of technology. As such, limited technological attainment remains a key factor that constrains economic growth and limits not only the capacity of the market to regulate itself but so, too, the evolution of the state toward a system of co-regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of articles about planning including those focusing on settlement house work and social reform, the development of heating and cooking technology in the U.S. in the 19th century and emergence of historic sites as tourist destinations in the U.S. in the late 19th century.

The article presents abstracts on city planning-related topics, including visions of waterfront development in postindustrial Philadelphia, the construction of a town planning perception of Colombo, and city planning and the U.S. census.

The article presents abstracts on planning-related topics which include an examination of the popularity of dancing in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1930s, an examination of how religious diversity in community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change and an examination of child labor in urban industries in the Dutch Republic.

The article presents abstracts on land use planning topics, including "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," "More Than Sector Theory: Homer Hoyt's Contributions to Planning Knowledge" and "Methodology for the Survival Analysis of Urban Building Stocks."

This section presents abstracts of papers on city planning published from 2007 to 2008, including "Streets, Sounds and Identity in Inter-war Harlem," by Clare Corbould, "(Re)making the Other, Heterosexualising Everyday Space," by Kath Browne, and "Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds," by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder.

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]

The article presents abstracts on planning which include "Labor Unions and Affordable Housing: An Uneasy Relationship," "Smoke and Mirrors: Willy Clarkson and the Role of Disguises in Inter-War England," and "Urbanization and Spatial Organization: Hospital and Orphanage Location in Chicago, 1848-1916."

Abstracts of articles related to state and national planning are presented which include "Analysis of Rail Transit Project Selection Bias With an Incentive Approach," by Wenling Chen, "Urban History for Planners," by Carl Abbott and "Rebuilding the Modern City After Modernism in Toronto and Berlin," by Douglas Young.

The speed of vehicle ownership expansion in emerging market and developing countries has important implications for transport and environmental policies, as well as the global oil market. The literature remains divided on the issue of whether the vehicle ownership rates will ever catch up to the levels common in the advanced economies. This paper contributes to the debate by building a model that explicitly models the vehicle saturation level as a function of observable country characteristics: urbanization and population density. Our model is estimated on the basis of pooled time-series (1960-2002) and crosssection data for 45 countries that include 75 percent of the world's population. We project that the total vehicle stock will increase from about 800 million in 2002 to more than two billion units in 2030. By this time, 56% of the world's vehicles will be owned by non-OECD countries, compared with 24% in 2002. In particular, China's vehicle stock will increase nearly twenty-foM, to 390 million in 2030. This fast speed of vehicle ownership expansion implies rapid growth in oil demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effect of development assistance programs on Local Agenda 21 (LA21) programs in three municipalities of Thailand. First, the article examines institutional changes in Thailand geared toward decentralization. Second, the article analyzes the effect based on the frameworks of Noda and Ouchi for the level of participation. The results indicate that participation was a top-down participation of local residents who presumed some benefits from the municipality in exchange for their attendance in meetings. Third, the article evaluates the effect in terms of project efficiency. The results show that municipalities conducted most of the actions declared in their LA21 but the sustainability of these actions is questionable. It is contended that LA21 has its limitations as a planning guide for sustainable cities in developing countries. An assistance program should be designed that helps the government of a developing country to institutionalize meaningful involvement for a participatory environmental policy formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of planning. They include "The Fall and Rise of the Local Community: A Comparative and Historical Perspective," by Hellmut Wollman, "The Compact Versus the Dispersed City: History of Planning Ideas on Sofia's Urban Form," by Sonia Hirt, and "A Paradigm for Practice," by Ronald D. Brunner.

The article presents abstracts related to planning. They include "Crowds and Leisure: Thinking Comparatively Across the 20th Century," "Time-Series Analysis of Clusters in City Size Distributions" and "The Transnational Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century American Urban Segregation."

Presents several abstracts featured in various journals as of August 2006. "Creating the Public Domain: Nineteenth-Century Local State Formation in Britain and the U.S.," by Alan Digaetano; "The Significance of Color Declines: A Re-Analysis of Skin Tone Differentials in Post-Civil Rights America," by Aaron Gullickson; "Deconstructing the City of Culture: The Long-Term Cultural Legacies of Glasgow 1990," by Beatriz García.

In the quest for sustainable development, numerous examples of 'best practice' have been created and circulated in national and international arenas. Yet despite the vast array of examples, demonstration projects, case studies, and the like, little is known about the ways in which best practices are produced and used, and their role in processes of policymaking. Focusing on best practice for urban sustainability, the author argues that, rather than conceptualising its role and impact in terms of policy transfer or lesson drawing, the creation, dissemination, and use of best practice can be better understood as a discursive process, in which not only is new knowledge created about a policy problem, but the nature and interpretation of the policy problem itself are challenged and reframed. Drawing on insights from concepts of governmentality, the author argues that best practices are at once a political rationality and a governmental technology through which the policy problem of urban sustainability is framed and defined. Illustrations of the practice of best practice show how contradictions emerge between claims for general applicability and the need for policy actors to understand the contingencies of the process of urban sustainability, in order to enrol it for their own struggles over sustainability. The local stickiness of best practices points to the very real struggles that the rationalities of urban sustainability have in competing with other governmentalities which seek to shape urban futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of environmental planning research. They include "Integrating a performance-based approach into practice: A case study," "Local commitment to state-mandated planning in coastal North Carolina" and "Fiscal consequences of concentrated poverty in a metropolitan region."

Presents abstracts of articles related to city planning. "Promoting Retail Innovation: Knowledge Flows During the Emergence of Self-Service and Supermarket Retailing in Britain," by Andrew Alexander, Gareth Shaw and Louise Curth; "The Nature of Op Art: Bridget Riley and the Art of Nonrepresentation," by Simon Rycroft; "Was the 1937 U.S. Housing Act a Pyrrhic Victory?," by D. Bradford Hunt.

Presents abstracts of several studies on environment and planning. "Explaining the Growth of British Multiple Retailing During the Golden Age," by Carlo Morelli; "Cities in the Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir," by Matthew Farish; "Geographers and the Tennessee Valley Authority," by Ronald Reed Boyce.

Presents abstracts of several studies on city planning. "Designing and Living in a New Industrial Suburb: Experiences in the Cannock Chase Coalfield From the 1950s to the 1970s," by Gareth Evans and Peter J. Larkham; "Learning to Shop in Zion: The Consumer Revolution in Great Basin Mormon Culture,1847-1910," by Greg Umbach; "Curing Congestion: Competing Plans for a Loop Highway and Parking Regulations in Boston in the 1920s," by Asha Weinstein.

Presents several abstracts of studies concerning land use planning. "North American Urban History: The Everyday Politics and Spatial Logics of Metropolitan Life," by Mary Corbin Sies; "The Myth of Liberty Place: Race and Public Memory in New Orleans," by Jacob A. Wagner; "Planned Industrial Districts in Chicago: Firms, Networks, and Boundaries," by Robert Lewis.

Recent research examined the relationship between certain indicators of environmental quality and income, concluding on the basis of econometric estimation that, in some cases, an inverted‐U relationship, which has been called an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), exists between the variables. There is speculation on the implications of this pattern for economic and environmental policy. This paper examines this research as a whole and finds that unequivocal evidence for an EKC relationship is scant; that there are important indicators that show a monotonically increasing relationship; that even where there may be an EKC relationship, most of the population is still on the increasing section of the curve, so that income growth on the basis of this relationship would result in considerable further environmental damage; and that a review of overall environmental quality, even in the richest countries, shows that it is still declining. It is concluded that, from the point of view of environmental sustainability, the income‐environment relationship is still problematic, and determined environmental policy will be required if future income growth is to be compatible with sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I assume that politicians maximize domestic political support subject to a political feasibility constraint set by the relationship between environmental quality and some politically desirable economic performance indicator Because pollution flows across national frontiers, the political feasibility frontier depends on other nations' environmental policies. Depending on the nature of domestic political pressures and the environmental spillovers between the countries, various game structures are possible. Knowledge of the structure of the game is helpful when addressing policy issues and the question of how to design international institutions in order to overcome international environmental collective action problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]