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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]

Ambient air pollution represents a global health crisis, leading to 7 million annual deaths worldwide. The rise of a "global environmental regime" manifests in the widespread adoption of environmental policies and laws to reduce ambient air pollution, but debate remains whether they have any effect. Scholars argue that the relationship between the global environmental regime and air pollution depends on the penetration of the global environmental regime. In this analysis, I argue that the relationship between the global environmental regime and air pollution levels is contingent on a country's position in the world-system. Using fixed effects panel analyses of 144 countries from 1990 to 2010, I find embeddedness in the global environmental regime does predict lower national air pollution levels. This effect, however, is smaller in semi-peripheral and peripheral countries. These findings contribute to an emerging body of scholarship integrating world society and world systems approaches in the study of the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intention of this paper is to (i) introduce a multi-regional dynamic emissions trading model and (ii) examine the potential impact of an emissions trading scheme (ETS) on the long-term evolution of energy technologies from national and regional perspectives in China. The establishment of this model is a salutary attempt to Sinicize the global integrated assessment model that combines economy, energy, and environment systems. The simulation results indicate that: (1) for majority of regions, ETS is more effective in cutting CO2 emissions than a harmonized carbon tax (HCT), but this might not be true for the entire country, which means that these two options have little difference in overall carbon reduction; (2) carbon tax policy is a more cost-effective option in curbing CO2 with respect to ETS in the long run; (3) neither ETS nor pure carbon tax provide enough incentives for the breakthrough of carbon-free energy technologies, which illustrates that matching with some other support policies, such as subsidies and R&D investment, is essential to extend the niche market; and (4) In the context of ETS, the diffusion of non-fossil technologies in regions that act as sellers performs much better than this diffusion in the buyer regions. [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]

Studies of environmental policy performance tend to concentrate on the impact of particular policy institutions or of single policy instruments. However, environmental policies most often consist of a package of policy instruments. Further, these studies pay no or very little attention to policy instruments directed at the demand side of the market. Therefore this article develops a policy typology for government intervention aimed at creating green markets. The typology distinguishes between four types of policy based on the balance between the supply-side and demand-side policy instruments. On the basis of the typology, a hypothesis on their ability to expand green markets is generated and tested in a comparative analysis of the performance of organic food policies in Denmark, Sweden, the UK and the US, focusing on their impact on organic consumption. Our analysis demonstrates that cross-country variation in organic food consumption is explained by differences in the packages of policy instruments applied, controlling for numerous systemic and individual-level alternative explanations. The analysis suggests that for environmental and political reasons, governments should apply more demand-side instruments when introducing environmental policies. [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]

To tackle China's profound environmental problems, Chinese leaders are now incorporating environmental targets in 5-year plans and experimenting with market-based mechanisms to supplement their traditional command and control mechanisms for environmental protection. In the recent years, China has produced a series of green policies, including green tax, green procurement, as well as green policies relevant to the financial sector, namely, green credit, insurance, and security policies. Of the three, the green credit policy is the most advanced, with three agencies (the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Peoples' Bank of China, and the China Banking Regulatory Commission) sharing the responsibility for implementation. The policy, approaching its fourth year of implementation, has proved resistant to China's massive economic upheaval following the global financial crisis. Its future success depends on effective environmental data collection and dissemination, technical guidance, and provision of true financial incentives for banks. The continued success in implementation could potentially provide China with the experience and confidence to address new challenges, such as the environmental and social conduct of its enterprises overseas. [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 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been engaged in a process of organizational learning to build civic capacity for nearly 4 decades, in effect discovering its civic mission. This article examines how EPA has increasingly become a more effective enabler of democratic network governance in the watershed arena and has developed ambitious cross-media initiatives to help transform the culture of the agency. Its very progress, however, highlights significant challenges that the agency must address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a theoretical policy-making model of chemical sunset that gradually substitutes green alternatives for persistent toxic substances within a finite timeframe. The technological inflexibility of these substances is a tough obstacle to a chemical sunset, because a chemical sunset seeks to ultimately stop, within a short period of time, the risky businesses of these substances that are highly entrenched into our society. In wrestling with this obstacle, the intelligent precautionary "polluter pays" principle integrates three policy tools: a "precautionary 'polluter pays' principle," "intelligent trial and error," and democratic "regulatory negotiation." It is designed to promote technological pluralism and strong democracy, as well as to create either trust or mutual adjustment among relevant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of visual images and perspective taking on concern for environmental problems. Participants in the experiment were 193 university students. Results replicated earlier results showing that perspective taking, combined with images of animals harmed by nature, caused an increase in biospheric environmental concerns. In addition, results showed that the empathic dimension of personal distress moderated the relationship between kind of image and kind of perspective on both biospheric and egoistic environmental concerns. Results about the lack of other moderating effects are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis of the world's transboundary water law has gradually shifted in the past half century from water resources development to water resources management and environmental protection. This change in institutional focus is a natural outcome of changing resource conditions, in particular the high levels of water resources development achieved in many regions as well as rising economic prosperity and associated changes in environmental perception. Surprisingly, this analysis reveals that transboundary water law in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) follows these global trends even though SSA's levels of water resources development, economic prosperity, and food security are significantly lower than any other region in the world. These findings suggest that the nature of SSA's transboundary water law may be largely "handed down" from other parts of the world with different realities than those present in SSA. Recognizing this relationship can provide important lessons for improving transboundary water governance in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes a fresh look at the regulatory determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) by asking whether the stringency and sustainability of environmental regulations affect FDI flows across 25 Western and Eastern European countries. Unlike the earlier literature, which considered only host country characteristics, this article focuses on the difference in the regulatory environments in home and host economies. The data suggest that more stringent environmental regulations in the investor's country relative to those in the potential host country are positively correlated with the probability of investment as well as with the volume of FDI. The results also show that firms in industries with higher abatement costs tend to invest more abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costa Rica's Biodiversity Law of 1998 is perhaps the most comprehensive legislation implementing the Convention on Biological Diversity. It includes provisions to better protect the intellectual property rights of rural communities regarding uses they have developed for natural resources and plants and animals they have bred. This article addresses how groups representing these peoples-the National Indigenous Board and National Peasant Board-obtained these provisions despite opposition from traditionally more powerful scientific and business communities. Data were collected on the formulation of the Biodiversity Law through qualitative techniques, including intensive interviews and archival research. It was found that fortuitous political conditions, or political opportunity structures, were crucial to the success of organizations representing rural communities. These supports included better-resourced allies, favorable international legal obligations and public opinion, and existing law that could be built on. Indicating broader patterns, it also was found that such political conditions have been salient during indigenous and peasant political activism elsewhere in Latin America and during formulation of similar biodiversity policy in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 objective of this paper is to assess the likely allocation effects of the current climate protection strategy as it is laid out in the National Allocation Plans (NAPs) for the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The multi-regional, multi-sectoral CGE-model DART is used to simulate the effects of the current policies in the year 2012 when the Kyoto targets need to be met. Different scenarios are simulated in order to highlight the effects of the grandfathering of permits to energy-intensive installations, the use of the project-based mechanisms (CDM and JI), and the restriction imposed by the supplementarity criterion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

In this paper we examine the emergence of firm-based global environmental standards as an approach to managing the environmental performance of complex global production networks. Firm-based global environmental standards exist when a firm defines a uniform set of process and product environmental performance requirements that must be adhered to by all of a firm's facilities around the world, even if these firm-based standards exceed the requirements of local and national environ mental regulations. We identify increasingly stringent end-market environmental regulation, as well as growing concern over the need to protect a firm's reputational capital and operating legitimacy, as two key drivers of the adoption of firm-based environmental standards. Our analysis suggests, however, that firms are responding to these external drivers in part because of the characteristics of global production networks—a production form that depends on the ability to produce from any manufacturing plant to any end market. The paper examines the impact of firm-based environmental standards through case studies of a cement plant in Thailand and an electronics manufacturing plant in Penang, Malaysia. In line with the literature on new institution economics, the case studies demonstrate that firm-based standards are providing a platform for learning and innovation within the firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore whether efficiency gains obtained by developing countries participation in emission trading could offset the economic risks that would be incurred by taking on binding commitments when future emissions are uncertain. Such commitments would allow developing countries to participate in emissions trading, which has significantly lower transaction costs than the present Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). However, because future emissions cannot be known, commitments can become more costly for the developing countries than expected. Using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model, we analyse whether the efficiency gains obtained by participating in emissions trading can offset this risk. We find that the efficiency gains that can be obtained by developing countries might not be very large compared to the risks they incur. Developing countries might therefore have good reasons not to embrace binding commitments in order to participate in "cap and trade" emissions trading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a case study of analyzing the print media coverage of an environmental controversy, this article aims to assess the status of transparency in China's environmental governance. The case study is based on a landmark January 2000 event in relation to the Nanjiang Industrial Park in Sihui, a county city located in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong Province. The findings of the case study send discordant and mixed signals, showing that transparency in the process of China's environmental governance is vulnerable to the extra-media factor-government control of information and the prior consideration of economic imperatives. Although substantial progress has been made in terms of increasing the degree of transparency in environmental protection work, administrative practices have simultaneously enriched the government's experience in the control of information for governance in the environmental arena, thus presenting an ongoing paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often suggested that innovation is one of the most desirable environmental policy aims, in that it promises to solve the conflict between environmental regulation and economic growth. Contrary to what is frequently advocated—that in order to foster innovation through regulation, most of the attention should be put on the regulation-setting process, I argue that a cooperative stance in the implementation of regulations also has a crucial impact, especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This argument is assessed looking at innovation effects that both direct regulations (command-and-control) and indirect regulations (negotiated voluntary agreements, called cleaner production agreements) have in this sector. A face-to-face survey questionnaire, with a non-probabilistic matching sampling strategy, was conducted in 322 firms representing four industrial sectors in Chile. The propensity-scores analysis demonstrates that SMEs involved in voluntary agreements innovate significantly more, as expressed through environmental management systems and techniques. In terms of technological innovations, voluntary agreements promoted incremental (rather than radical) multimedia innovations. Nevertheless, they had a significant effect on triggering at least one radical process change in the SMEs engaged in the programme. I conclude by emphasising that a cooperative style in the design and implementation of regulations has a key role to play in environmental capacity building in SMEs, and that this approach can create the appropriate conditions for innovation. However, this potential cannot be fully realised if there are not strong market and regulatory stimuli towards the development of more radical environmental innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines stakeholder involvement and influence as part of voluntary environmental agreements between regulatory agencies and companies. Ten pilot projects that were part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Project XL (excellence and leadership) were examined too evaluate process goals (fairness and competence) and outcome goals (trust and incorporation of public values in decisions). The ten case studies encompass a range of businesses, locations, and ideas for regulatory "reinvention" projects, and they span a spectrum of stakeholder participation process and outcomes. Although results point to numerous problems in implementation, they also indicate that in several cases, stakeholder groups significantly affected the final companies can work collaboratively and constructively with residents of local communities, members of national environmental organizations and other interest groups, and government regulatory officials to craft voluntary environmental agreements that are cooperative and environmentally beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's fragmented world demands creative institutional arrangements to allow governments, international organizations, and civil society actors to join forces in addressing global environmental problems. This article discusses the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) as foreseen under Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol in the context of new models of governance. To do so, it depicts CDM's history, institutional setting and participatory elements. The CDM serves as a concrete example of how new collaborative networks consisting of nation states and nonstate actors can help in implementing international trea- ties. The articles traces the history of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process to provide a sufficient background for a more detailed discussion of the CDM. On that basis, it provides an analysis of the CDM, and depict the Prototype Carbon Fund, administered by the World Bank, as an example for an innovative model of cooperation between the private and the public sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its many promises, devolved governance may pose great challenges to environmental conservation, especially in the context of newly democratized polities where local communities tend to be dominated by place-bound clientele networks that pursue developmental interests at the expense of conservation. In this paper the authors examine how a conservation movement in Huben Village of Yunlin County in Taiwan has successfully been organized to save the endangered bird species Fairy Pitta (Pitta nuymphia) against gravel extraction activities that were backed by local clientele networks of politicians and business interests. The case illustrates how challenges of devolved governance can be addressed not necessarily by centralized authority but by connecting grassroots victims of environmental degradation with broader conservation movements supported by networks of civic organizations that transcend narrow geographical interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether petroleum refineries that violate environmental laws in Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities tend to receive smaller fines than those refineries in White and affluent communities. The sample consists of all petroleum refinery facilities fined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) between 1998 and 1999 for violating the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and/or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (N = 60). The mean penalty for noncompliance is much lower in Black than in White census tracts ($108,563 vs. $341,590) and in low-income than in high-income census tracts ($259,784 vs. $334,267). Multivariate analysis suggests that these disparities are not due to factors such as the seriousness of violation, the number of past violations, the facility inspection history, the facility production, or the EPA region in which the violating refinery is situated. It is concluded that the government does a poor job of providing equal protection to racially and economically diverse communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, environmental activists and some academic studies of environmental political issues have portrayed environmental protection as a new social consensus. This view has some, though limited, capacity for explaining the controversial character of many environmental protection issues and the frequent losses that environmental activists experience in political struggles. In an effort to clarify this seeming conundrum, the author delineates the core of the societal consensus thesis' best explanation for the controversial character of many environmental policy decisions. This explanation is contrasted with explanation that draws on conflict among three coherent rival environmental perspectives in contemporary political life. These environmental views are integral, if frequently unrecognized, aspects of familiar general social perspectives distinguished by contrasting principles, values, and practical objectives. A strategy is designed to facilitate responsible environmental protection legislation in light of these three rival perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the arguments for and potential of environmental tax reform (ETR) from the standpoint of red-green politics. ETR has been criticised in relation to ethics, democracy and social justice. However, the ethical and democratic critiques can be countered through a critical examination of the potential of ETR as they take the fallacious neo-classical perspective as their reference point. In relation to social justice, the potential regressive consequences of some environmental taxes will, however, require mitigation and compensation. Despite the unsatisfactory nature of the recent reforms implemented in a number of European countries, ETR has much to offer, both in terms of the effectiveness of environmental regulation and in reducing unemployment. In the longer term it could contribute to the creation of more favourable conditions for radical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the articles published in this issue of Human and Experimental Toxicology. In many discussions on the assessment of toxicological foundations of hormesis, questions have been raised about the possible societal impact of hormesis, especially in the area of environmental regulations. Such discussions have quickly focused on whether and how hormesis could influence the costs of various regulations.

Presents an abstract of the article `Pollution as news: Media and stock market reactions to the Toxic Release Inventory data,' by James Hamilton, published in the `Journal of Environmental Economics and Management' dated 1995.