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Theories of the environmental state – treadmill of production and ecological modernization – have dominated discussion of the political economy of environmental change. While the former contends that the state's mitigation of labor–capital relations engenders ecological instability, the latter posits that the state's use of business-friendly incentives can goad producers and consumers to adopt sustainable practices. However, these theories largely focus on dynamics related to class, labor, and markets, and thus overlook the role that race and racism play in the political economy. In contrast, this article argues that racial politics are not peripheral influences, but rather are central to the political economy in which environmental policy formation occurs. The author advances the argument with the concept of the racial fix, which refers to the idea that race and racism are mechanisms for circumventing barriers that slow the treadmill of production. Synthesizing long-standing and emerging research, the author outlines three dimensions – spatial, political, and cognitive – that constitute the racial fix. Overall, this article not only shows how race and racism serve as building blocks for environmental state formation, but also articulates new theoretical paths for studying the relationship between race and environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As marginalized neighborhoods benefit from cleanup and environmental amenities often brought by municipal sustainability planning, recent trends of land revaluation, investments, and gentrification are posing a conundrum and paradox for environmental justice (EJ) activists. In this article, I examine the progression of the urban EJ agenda—from fighting contamination to mobilizing for environmental goods and resisting environmental gentrification—and analyze how the EJ scholarship has reflected upon the complexification of this agenda. I argue that locally unwanted land uses can be reconceptualized from contamination sources to new green amenities because of the displacement they seem to trigger or accelerate. [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]

How can activists and policy makers encourage better environmental behavior in a context of poor governmental enforcement? This article examines the case of the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, a Chinese nonprofit organization, to show how a transparency-based platform can encourage brand-sensitive multinational corporations, their suppliers, their investors, local governments, and consumers to behave in more environmentally responsible ways, even in a context of low governmental enforcement. Using Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs as its model, this article argues that a transparency-based platform can serve an important coordinating function across multiple sectors, creating a mechanism through which market forces are channeled in pro-environmental ways. Transparency-based platforms can help develop new norms about public disclosure, corporate governance, and consumer responsibility, but they only function in places with sufficient state monitoring capacity, adequate legal protections, and in markets where local firms are vulnerable to external financial pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political polarization is often analyzed at the mass level through examination of attitudinal differences, but little attention is devoted to how polarization might be manifested through differences in individual behavior, especially in areas that do not appear to be explicitly political in nature. Political polarization, however, may extend to differences in lifestyles among individuals, especially differences in prosocial environmental behavior. This could be especially true for behaviors that are perceived as markers of political attitudes. In an examination of self-reported recycling and conservation behavior, we find that controlling for a range of alternative explanations for why individuals engage in pro-environmental behavior, partisan and ideological dispositions are among the most robust causes of such behavior. We demonstrate that these behavioral differences are exacerbated by attention to political news. The findings indicate that the effects of polarization extend beyond political attitudes into social and economic choices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Non-governmental organizations play an increasingly important role in the formation and implementation of environmental policies and institutions. The growing involvement of non-state actors in environmental governance is generally welcomed for two reasons: civil society presumably helps governments reach more effective and democratic agreements by providing information and legitimacy. Yet, there are reasons to doubt civil society’s capacity to fulfill these two functions. Many non-governmental organizations themselves lack democratic legitimacy; and weak international agreements are often the result not of lack of information, but of lack of political will. While non-state actors clearly have an important role to play in global environmental governance, this article calls for more research to identify when and how non-state actors indeed contribute to more effective and democratically more legitimate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the design and implementation of Marine Integrated Decision Analysis System (MIDAS), a spatial decision support system (SDSS). MIDAS allows users to select values for a set of governance, ecological and socioeconomic variables. Outcomes resulting from interactions between these variables are then modeled to demonstrate the effectiveness of management in marine managed areas (MMAs) in Belize, Panama, and other areas. MIDAS is written in Java SDK and Runtime Environment (JRE; version 6 update 5) that enables portability across computer platforms. The article describes the utility of MIDAS in three contexts: (1) to assist managers, policy makers, and various stakeholders in understanding the critical determining factors (CDFs) for MMA success, (2) to enhance multistakeholder analysis and promote consensus, and (3) to provide a free and intuitive interface with a capability to incorporate user valuations of factors affecting marine management and to generate reports and maps concerning risk. MIDAS has been tested and validated by a variety of users in three workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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 present study evaluated the hypothesis that people who strongly adhere to Christian orthodoxy may be less proenvironmental to the extent that they are less aware of the biospheric consequences of environmental problems (biospheric AC) but that they may be more proenvironmental than others to the extent that they are more aware of the egoistic and social-altruistic consequences of environmental problems (egoistic AC and social-altruistic AC, respectively). College students (N = 192) completed measures of awareness of negative consequences (AC), Christian orthodoxy, and environmental behavior. Results showed that Christian orthodoxy negatively related to all measures of environmental behavior. Additionally, biospheric AC was a complete mediator in Christian orthodoxy's relationships with environmental intentions and willingness to pay for environmental protection and was a partial mediator in Christian orthodoxy's relationship with proenvironmental political behavior. Neither egoistic AC nor social-altruistic AC correlated with Christian orthodoxy, so their mediating properties were not assessed. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates weaknesses of consumer boycotts. First, usual shortcomings of collective action, such as coordination failure and free riding, reduce considerably the success likelihood. Second, consumers with the highest ability to hurt the targeted firm's profit also have the highest opportunity cost of boycotting. Thus, they are less likely to participate in the boycott. Conversely, the most involved consumers have high environmental preferences and small amounts of consumption, which prevent them from hurting the firm's profit enough. [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.

Environmental and health issues top the political agendas of all levels of Canadian government. environmental groups are most concerned about climate change and reducing related anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Health advocates are concerned about Canada's growing rate of obesity and ensuing health problems. In this era of lifestyle politics, Anthony giddens suggests governments and community groups need to collaborate to address these issues. In Nova Scotia, however, the government's collaboration with off-highway vehicle groups to develop a trail system is under attack from an active transportation group, the Kieran Pathways Society. By identifying social, political, and economic discourses, this case demonstrates how lifestyles politics have not only supplanted emancipatory politics but also neglect ecocentric values. Thus, giddens' "Third Way" may not resolve today's environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Woking Borough Council in the United Kingdom has long been committed to protecting the environment, a goal explicitly stated as one of the borough's top three priorities. Woking is also known for its pioneering approach in operating an extensive networked electricity and district heating system based on co- and trigeneration, as well as what is understood to be the United Kingdom's first commercially operating 200kWe fuel cell. Its other innovative measures to protect the environment and to reduce pollution include the adoption of energy- and water-saving techniques for council-owned buildings and public places, with revenue savings reinvested back into still additional measures to further improve sustainability. These various initiatives are providing a practical framework for advancing a more equitable, clean, decentralized, and socially cooperative energy system in service to Woking's inhabitants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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."

This article argues that waste management and recycling have become regional or international issues; they can no longer be considered only in a national context. The regionalization or internationalization of waste and recycling issues is caused in large part by the steady advance of economic integration, especially increasing trade and investment flows resulting from trade and investment liberalization. Just as economic integration has separated the location of consumption from the location of most efficient production, it has also separated the most efficient and effective location of recycling from the location of production and consumption. This makes it difficult to operate domestically oriented recycling schemes, as demonstrated by the case of Japan. Therefore, national policies, although still important, are now insufficient, and this article will propose policy recommendations to address this, including the development of national recycling systems and capacity linked to regional recycling zones, regionally coordinated extended producers responsibility, and regional certification schemes for recyclers and traders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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."

The Citizen Submissions on Enforcement Matters is administered by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), a trilateral institution established by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States as part of the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC). The CEC received 55 submissions from June 1995 to May 2006, although these remain to be substantially discussed in the literature. This study fills in some of the gaps through an analysis of the submission process from an actor- and results-based perspective. Two guiding questions form the basis for this article: What are some key demographic or geographical differences among ‘whistle-blowers’ and has the submission process achieved its goals? The conclusion is that key differences among submitters are due to such interlinked factors as gender, place, and issue, which should be more carefully considered by the CEC and other related institutions to enhance effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

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.

Environmental historians have tended, until recently, to overlook how inequality is generated and reinforced in the metropolitan landscape. One way to historicize urban environmental justice is to analyze the transformation of property through space and time. This article explores how engineers and reformers in early twentieth-century Seattle launched several earth moving projects, called regrades, to renovate the downtown core. The regrades removed millions of tons of earth, flattened hills, and erased tidelands, but they also unleashed landslides and ripped apart neighborhoods populated by poor and minority residents. Environmental volatility and social inequality thus reinforced one another to shape Seattle's political and physical geography. By telling spatial stories about property, urban environmental historians can better map social power against shifting landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

•Summary: In this article we explore a continuum of interventions that offer at-risk children and youth experience in outdoor wilderness environments. Though these experiences are thought to enhance the well-being of participants, the mechanisms by which programming in natural environments promotes health have been poorly understood. In this article we discuss different types of outdoor programmes in which social workers and allied professionals participate, linking programme goals and outcomes to research on mitigating risk and promoting resilience in at-risk populations. • Findings: Findings are based on qualitative data gathered as part of regular programme evaluations and a separate study of 14 participants' reactions to programming. Results show favourable outcomes in terms of relationship building and a sense of spirituality and purpose, though there was little increased awareness of environmental issues. Follow-up and support after programming helped to reinforce changes made during the outdoor experience. • Applications: These case studies, combined with a review of the literature, provide the basis for a theoretically sound approach to understanding the health-enhancing mechanisms that operate through outdoor experience-based education and treatment. Similarities between the gains made in well-being and resilience are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Environmental economics involve techniques for monetary valuations of environmental resources. But environmental problems raise fundamental questions of social, political and environmental organization. This article mirrors in economics the 'cross-over' of Left and Right suggested by Giddens. Positive economics leads to notions of planning, not to laissez-faire and makes evident Habermas's view of the 'scientization' of politics. Positive economics contains an implicit political theory of technocracy. Economics cannot conceive of social resources, and views environmental resources as externalities. It attempts to obtain money valuations for non-traded resources. Essentially, this is a planning supplement to markets and it is unclear how both markets and planning supplement can be justified simultaneously. Environmental questions are also ethical. We act as citizens in considering them. They are less suited to markets than to a public forum which requires justification in terms of the collective welfare and involves a process of dialogue between citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]