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Recent theories of firms' environmental behavior propose that numerous factors influence a firm's environmental decisionmaking process. Economic considerations play a central role, but interactions between the economic climate, regulatory structure, and social culture in which a firm operates are more important than economic considerations alone. This article investigates the conditions surrounding eight existing pulp and paper mills in Maine that influence the level of compliance. Factors unique to Maine's economy, history, and relationship between people and their environment come together to influence firms' environmental performance and attitude. Such "place-based characteristics" are crucial in designing policies to promote economic development and protect environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. We do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we observe that the governance of streams as water resources requires the state to create a scalar hierarchy that fixes certain characteristics of streams at certain scales of state action. These fixes attempt to resolve, bracket, or ignore the temporal and spatial variability of streams that can confound governance; however, these variabilities are essential to the scientific study of streams. At each of the four distinct scales, four different operations crucial to market function were observed; at each scale, elements of natural variability were fixed or confined to be expressed only within the given scale. These observations reveal principles of how scale functions within environmental governance, as well as failures where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. In three different state settings, the establishment of a fixed scale of governance is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render an unruly set of temporal and spatial flows as instead occurring within certain fixed scalar boundaries, and thus amenable to governance with markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This pair of papers examines and describes the state action necessary to make markets function as environmental policy instruments and as strategies of governance. They do this through a detailed look at the mechanics of environmental credit compliance markets in the US states of Oregon, Ohio, and North Carolina in which stream credits are privately created and sold to developers who have impacted protected stream systems. In this paper, we examine the tools, techniques, and people involved in the creation of a value-bearing stream credit out of a physical stream or river site. These observations reveal important principles of how science functions within governance, as well as where gaps and resistances appear that create unforeseen outcomes in market-led policy. We examine the construction and use of instruments that define natural processes as objects with value; these techniques and tools include databases and spreadsheets, algorithms, and field scoring tools that have been scavenged from a wide range of scientific and governance practices and are not themselves inherently capitalist or developed for capitalist purposes. In three different state settings, the move from measure to value is made in different ways that depend on the local institutional and social context. However, they all act to render a network of interacting ecological forces as a field of discrete ecosystem objects amenable to governance with markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies explored the interaction effect between policy instruments and the policy environment on environmental governance. Based on policy instrument theory, this paper conducts fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the combined effect of policy instruments and the policy environment on the environmental governance efficiency of local governance. This study found four effective configurations of local government environmental governance, which can be summarized as the mandatory mode and the cooperative mode, and three inefficient configurations that can be summarized as the out-of-control mode. The results show that the regions adopting the mandatory mode are economically underdeveloped, while the regions using the cooperative mode are developed. Besides, local government competition leads to the softening of policy instruments, while government-enterprise collusion exacerbates the failure of environmental policy instruments. This paper summarizes the effective modes and reveals the reasons for the low efficiency of local government environmental governance in China. The conclusions provide not only empirical evidence for the study of policy instrument theory but also beneficial insights for the selection of environmental policy instruments and environmental governance practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While critical political economy (CPE) has yet to play a prominent role in eco-social policy research, this paper argues that a deeper engagement with CPE and a better understanding of the global political economy can enhance eco-social policy debates. CPE can help us to see the contradictions in and impediments to integrating environmental and social policies, and particularly why both of these categories continue to be mediated and shaped by economic logics. In order to develop these arguments, we analyse recent international discourses on agricultural subsidies promoted by key policy actors such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. By examining agriculture as a nodal point between diverse scales and domains such as the local, global, environmental, social, and economic spheres, we explore how certain positions are prioritised over others. We argue that the discourse on 'repurposing subsidies' in global agricultural policy expresses a 'new critical orthodoxy' that recognises the need for transformation but fails to address the structural conditions of the global political economy responsible for environmental and social crises. Instead, the proposed solutions rely on existing institutions and capitalist logics to resolve current crises, even if the latter are underpinned by these logics. Our analysis underlines the need for eco-social policy scholarship to be cognizant of how environmental and social policy integration is always embedded within a particular global political economy that reproduces certain inequalities and is not a neutral policy terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes the notion of a "spectacle of repair," a carefully calibrated social technology of green governance aimed at managing the environmental degradation through control over images in Warsaw, Poland. Using case studies Million Trees for Warsaw project and a candidacy for the Green Capital of Europe and building on political ecology literature that addresses the rise of new opportunities for capitalist expansion through restoration activity, this article claims that the production of the green policy sphere allows for a creation of an array of possible "green" actions in the city that are presented as interchangeable and effectively commensurable. As the municipality heavily invests in greenery and a removal of visible signs of messiness and dirt in the city, the depoliticized spectacle of a clean and green urban space focuses on creating an image of the authorities actively combating the pollution as well as working towards making Warsaw more "livable." At the same time, the two major roots of pollution found in ever-increasing car traffic and old coal-heating systems remain insufficiently addressed amid a lack of political will. The paper argues that mitigation strategy of the city hall thus heavily relies on a management of visibilities; attempting to alleviate the citizens' pressure to tackle the largely invisible air pollution by delivering the tidy greenery desired by the urban elites, keeping the city fit for competing in the global neoliberal economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the convergence of per capita carbon and ecological footprints in G7 countries during 1961–2016. For this purpose, we propose a new unit root test in the panel setting–the panel Fourier threshold unit root test. This test takes into consideration both multiple smooth structural changes and nonlinearity. According to the literature, the power of the nonlinear unit root tests is reduced in the case of ignoring structural breaks. Therefore, we expect to get more reliable empirical findings by utilizing this methodology. The empirical results of this paper show that these series have nonlinear behaviors for the period 1961–2016. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the absolute convergence hypothesis is valid in G7 countries for both regimes. Thus, governments can conduct common environmental policies, including international climate summits and agreements, instead of national-based policies to mitigate environmental deterioration in their countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a historical case study, this paper explores the political potential of volunteerism in urban natural resources management. As governments continue to rely on unpaid labor to perform essential services, volunteerism has proliferated in urban protected lands during the neoliberal era. It is therefore worthwhile to study the power that volunteers may wield at their service sites, alongside the scholarly attention already paid to the inefficacy and the inadequacy of volunteer labor. By drawing on science and technology studies literature, especially concerning the role of citizen science in activist movements, this article analyzes how volunteer stewards influenced natural resources policy in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. A local agency, the district is responsible for nearly 70,000 acres in the county that encompasses Chicago, IL. For most of the twentieth century, forestation constituted the district's official land management policy, as leaders sought to match its ecologically diverse holdings to the agency's name. In the late 1970s, volunteers won permission from the district to begin restoring prairies in the forest preserves. Working autonomously, volunteer stewards cultivated expert credibility in the science of ecological restoration. Over several decades, they drew on their scientific authority to convince forest preserve leaders to adopt ecological restoration as the district's primary land management policy, a process culminating in the early twenty-first century. The paper also explores the fragility of volunteer authority rooted in scientific expertise, by tracking how an anti-restoration movement and, later, forest preserve staff members successfully undercut volunteer expertise in ecological restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a genealogy of the emergence of a common EU flood policy, including the scope and direction of this policy. Noticing how EU policy proposes green infrastructure (associated with using nature as a buffer zone in managing floods) as an alternative to grey infrastructure (implying fixed installations of concrete and cement), this paper adopts the theoretical lens of the so-called infrastructural turn, which advocates a relational investigation of infrastructure. By engaging this approach, the paper shows how flood infrastructure can contain very different compositions of (unruly) water and (settled) land. A narrative of a historically strong focus on guarding society from the powerful forces of nature through a fixed line of defense is increasingly giving way to more muddy states—quite literally—where society is expected to learn to live with flooding and show ecological consideration. To capture the EU's, and especially the European Commission's efforts to establish a pan-European flood infrastructure that accommodates this turn, the concepts of de- and re-infrastructuring are developed. These concepts act as heuristic devices to capture how policy performs some combinations between water and land as constituting an attractive and functional flood infrastructure, but constitutes other infrastructural relations of the aquatic and the terrestrial as undesirable and, hence, as malfunctioning. This performative act of distinguishing between what constitutes "good and proper" versus "bad and undesirable" infrastructure is referred to as a politics of infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Green Deal is the cornerstone of a comprehensive strategic package (European Green Deal Strategic Framework, EGDSF) which aims at transforming the EU into a climate-neutral and competitive economy by 2050. The present paper analyses the EGDSF policy design and investigates how it will affect EU environmental policy. It highlights that environmental policy areas are not characterized by the same level of ambition and are not equally equipped in terms of legislative initiatives (setting regulatory and economic instruments) to deliver on that ambition. When considering both these aspects, the policy areas of climate and energy (including GHG emissions from transport) emerge as the driving force of the EGDSF. Instead, in the biodiversity policy area, there is an evident mismatch between environmental objectives and legislative initiatives, which, in the long term, could jeopardize the achievement of all the key EGD goals, given their indivisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causation between economic growth, tourism import, industrialization, renewable energy, non-renewable energy use, trade openness, and environmental sustainability which is proxied by carbon emissions for 8 Asian countries (China, Japan, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) over 20 years. Causal relations were tested using Pooled Mean Group Autoregressive distributive lag model (PMG-ARDL) and Dumitrescu and Hurlin's (2012) panel granger causality test The PMG-ARDL model results reveal that in the long-run renewable energy usage, economic growth, and trade have a significant negative influence on the emission of carbon, while non-renewable energy usage, tourism import, and industrialization exhibit a significant positive impact on CO2 emissions of the sampled Asian countries. In the short run, renewable energy has a significant negative influence on CO2 emissions. While economic growth exhibit a significant positive influence on carbon emissions in the short-run. Furthermore, the Granger causality analysis reveals that there is a feedback mechanism between industrialization, tourism import, non-renewable energy, renewable energy, and CO2 emissions meaning that the future dynamics of carbon emissions in the sampled countries can be significantly explained by industrialization, tourism import, renewable energy, and non-renewable energy. Contrarily, trade and economic growth are good to explain the dynamics of carbon effusion of the sampled Asian countries in the future but without feedback. It is recommended that policymakers in Asian countries should formulate stringent environmental policies that will encourage industries in these countries to utilize clean energy sources so that economic growth will be achieved simultaneously with carbon neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product changeovers are especially critical for multiproduct environments where key production system requirements are flexibility, time, and quality. Massive waste of production time and environmental pollution increase with changeovers significantly. It is noted that the green supply chain is gradually emerging, and the environmental policies in countries are also increasing pressure on manufacturers globally. However, how to improve the changeovers' environmental performance in manufacturing enterprise are not entirely focused. The present study aims to raise the changeovers' time efficiency and reduce environmental pollution in the multiproduct production system. This paper first analyzes the characteristics of multiproduct production systems and the causes of inefficient work and pollution and then extracts the problems that need to be optimized. They are the frequent changeover work, complex operation programs, and load imbalance. Multiproduct Production Fast Changeover (MPFC) is developed based on these problems, which integrates the Analytic Hierarchy Process, Entropy Weight method, Divisive Analysis, and Firefly algorithm. In addition, Divisive Analysis's distance calculation is improved for flexible clustering targets. Firefly algorithm's exploration, exploitation, and population coordination mechanisms have also been enhanced. The effectiveness of MPFC is proved in a real multiple flow-lines production case: time efficiency was increased, while the multiple industrial pollutions and key resource consumption were also reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The single-use plastic bag is the most legislated item of plastic in the world, banned in over 92 countries. The bans are largely concentrated in Africa and the Caribbean, where the plastic bags are often black and the plastic footprints small. The bans have destabilised essential economic, social, and technical arrangements of marginalised communities reliant on plastic engagements and adaptations to improvise against multiple, overlapping, incursive forms of violence. This article seeks to understand the spatial and material nature of these legislative actions and the particular item of single-use plastic they target. Acknowledging the (spatialised) material realities of the single-use plastic bag, this article argues that these bans are a legislative response to the black plastic bag as spatialised, racialised, sexualised, abject Other. Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public administration has moved beyond speaking of sustainability as a norm or a philosophy towards implementation and action. Lessons learned from sustainable development practice must now be documented and shared to increase the positive impact of sustainability initiatives. This series of papers offers that opportunity, with a special focus on local government applications of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prompted by the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transport sector, the Chinese government has set ambitious targets for the uptake of electric vehicles. To achieve these targets is however a challenging task, due to various barriers in the uptake of electric vehicles, at both micro- and macro-levels. A range of monetary and non-monetary incentives has been implemented, or being considered for implementation, to overcome these barriers. This paper reviews these incentives with a view to assess the extent to which they are likely to remove the barriers in the uptake of electric vehicles. The review suggests that the primary focus of these incentives is to remove the micro-level barriers, such as high upfront costs, poor technical performance, and insufficient charging infrastructure. Limited attention has been paid to the macro-level barriers (for example, fragmented authority and local protectionism), despite ample evidence suggesting that these barriers could significantly impede the uptake of electric vehicles. Further, these incentives have tended to rely on regulation-based measures to remove the barriers. Only in the recent years, there appears to be a gradual shift towards market-based measures. This shift could improve the effectiveness of electric vehicle policies. The effectiveness of these policies could be enhanced if one recognizes the underlying macro-level barriers that are likely to protract or distort the implementation of market-based measures. This paper also provides some recommendations to remove these macro-level barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the Fourth Occasional California Workshop on Environmental and Resource Economics held at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) on October 16 and 17, 1999. Samples of papers presented evaluating policy and trends set by them; Funding from the United States Environmental Protection Agency; Schedule of next workshop.

The author reflects on environmental governance in an institutional setting. He mentions that the creation of environmental policies needs the participation of the public and private sectors with an emphasis on governance. He also discusses that the protection of the environment is done in multi-level institutional conditions which include international cooperation. The author describes that the decision making process for environmental policies includes more interested groups in global and local levels. He also presents papers on institutional governance of the environment.

Articles from four California news papers focusing on pesticide use and farm workers were content analyzed to track inclusion of pro- and anti- pesticide sources, along with neutral sources. The authors applied hegemony theory to news content and historical, socioeconomic, and demographic data. Results indicate that in all newspapers, "counter- hegemonic" anti-pesticide sources were the most-often quoted. Analysis suggests that newspapers. themselves part of the ruling hegemony. nevertheless do sometimes provide significant space for opposing voices on environmental justice issues, especially when the sources become professional challengers, such as the United Farm Workers Union, highly legitimized by their routine use in the press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing global pressure on transition to carbon neutrality, various technical and policy efforts such as emission trading scheme and carbon tax are being made to improve energy productivity. Yet, there are not many literatures that analyze determinants of firm-level energy productivity, which is an important issue as energy use in industry accounts for one fourth of global carbon emission. This study investigates factors affecting energy productivity such as technology innovation, environmental policy and energy price based on firm-level data from the Korean Emission Trading Scheme (KETS). The total factor energy productivity is estimated by industry based on stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and panel data analysis is performed to identify determinants of firm-level energy productivity. The results show that energy productivity in Korea has been improved since 2016, and technical progress and environmental policy play an important role in promoting energy productivity. In addition, analysis identifying industry-specific characteristics is performed as their production process and energy consumptions structures vary. The result shows that innovation activity does not significantly affect energy productivity in process industries, but it does in the assembling and high technology industries. This paper implies that policy design reflecting industry-specific characteristics is important to improve energy efficiency more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In January 2008, the UK Labour government announced that new nuclear power would play a role in the generation of low carbon electricity, and thus in the mitigation of climate change. This reframing of new nuclear power as a means of tackling climate change signalled a dramatic U-turn on Labour’s commitment to decommission all existing UK nuclear power stations by 2025. In the context of the political reframing of new nuclear builds, this article examines how the UK news media contributed to the reframing of nuclear power as low carbon, and the implications this has for public understanding of nuclear power and climate change. Covering the time period from September 2005 to January 2008, a critical discourse analysis of three UK newspapers — the Daily Mirror (tabloid), the Daily Mail (mid-range) and the Independent (broadsheet) — is presented. This period covers the months leading up to the launch of the UK government’s first Energy Review in January 2006, to the publication of the government’s final White Paper on Nuclear Power in January 2008. The analysis found that the official governmental discourse on nuclear power as essential to climate change mitigation and the security of future energy supplies was variously reproduced and contested across the three newspapers. However, while the government’s rebranding of nuclear as less risky than climate change is not explicitly endorsed by any of the newspapers, it certainly provides the discursive context through which policy decisions on new nuclear have been largely accepted by the UK news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a world facing catastrophic shocks, there are tremendous opportunities for management scholars to engage and make fundamental contributions to the grand challenges that lie ahead. To do so, our focus must move away from a theory-fetish toward a more applied action orientation that contributes to theory-building but does not make that its main or singular aim. In this paper, we argue, that our field's primary research aim must not be to see how we can build theory out of a crisis, but rather how our organizational and management theories can contribute concretely to helping humanity prepare for and respond to these shocks and build long-term societal resilience. Furthermore, we argue that management scholars need to vigorously embrace a research agenda on sustainability focusing on deep engagement with practitioners to address grand challenges. To do so, we draw on experiences from our deep engagement with practitioners—an ethnographic study and a scientific activism effort. We offer several lessons and identify implications of deep engagement for impact within organization studies such as dedicated space in journals for impact cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the effect of administrative arrangements on program administration and program outcomes is a central question for those interested in policy implementation. In the implementation of federal programs, the specific state-level administrative arrangements can have a significant impact not only on resource distribution patterns, but also on the ability of involved agencies to secure adequate state resources for the program. This paper addresses this question through the lens of the Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund program designed to fund water quality infrastructure. Employing a dataset covering nearly thirty years of state-level data, we find that measures of administrative structure and state capability are more powerful explanators of state resource decisions than are more standard explanations of politics, needs, and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new guidelines on state aid for environmental protection and energy also allow aid in the form of reduction from green levies. The aid may be granted retroactively when green levies harm the competitiveness of heavy electricity users. This paper argues that the harmful impact of green levies may be exaggerated by the use of gross value added, while the necessity of aid and its proportionality are presumed rather than proven. The fact that a company or sector may suffer loss of competitiveness from bearing the full levy does not necessarily show that it needs a reduction up to the limit allowed by the guidelines. The actual reduction which is granted may be unnecessary and. therefore, it would constitute disproportional state aid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the politics of nature be envisioned for an age conscious of the complexity, contingency, and relationality of the world? What new practices are required to do justice to the recognition that the potential to act, shape, and change emerging worlds lies within complex epistemological and ontological relations? This paper describes an interdisciplinary study conducted between 2007 and 2010 in Loweswater, the English Lake District, that addressed these questions. Here, for three years, a ‘new collective’ as described by Latour emerged that carried out its own epistemological and ontological experiments: the Loweswater Care Project (LCP). The LCP was shaped by ideas about ‘new collectives’ and the commitment to understanding material ‘intra-action’ in situ. This inspired an appreciation of the radical relationality of people and things, and an approach to doing politics with things that we term ‘intra-active collective politics’. In this paper we highlight the consequences of this approach for knowing, but also for action and ‘management’. The research and the experimental forum of the LCP lie at a crossroads between the preoccupations of environmental management (particularly catchment management), the concerns of science and technology studies, and posthumanist thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. Following Kojève's reading of contradiction in Hegel's oeuvre, I argue that contradiction is a constitutive feature of low carbon interventions. This is an alternative to conventional readings of contradiction as a provisional encounter of opposites in which one will eventually cancel out the other. I unpack the concept of contra diction in three ways: first, by displaying a Hegelian-inspired understanding of contradiction in relation to change, time, and desire; second, by explaining how inherent contradictions can also be read in relation to the excesses that characterize the deployment of methods of calculation in low carbon interventions; and third, by situating these contradictions within the overall dynamics of carbon governance and purposive attempts to bring about a low carbon transition. The paper explores the practical implications of this analysis in a case of low carbon interventions in social housing in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The case study shows that, if contradictions are at the heart of low carbon interventions, contradiction analysis may provide a direction towards broader reconfigurations of social and technological practices and generate a desire to change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fish consumption advisories (FCAs), or voluntary state recommendations for foraging and consuming fish from compromised waters, place the onus of negotiating contaminated environments squarely upon individuals who consume local fish. As a result, peoples who eat fish caught from local waters for reasons of food insecurity, cultural practice, or religious practice are ignored, producing environmental inequalities. This paper examines the political history of FCAs in a specific geographical context, New York State, in order to assess the explicit environmental governance frameworks through which these inequalities are generated. It demonstrates that FCA policy is principally an outgrowth of a conservation movement geared towards support for recreational anglers and not those who fish for subsistence. However, conservationism is not the only governance framework at work, as this paper also demonstrates that commercialized processes of neoliberal environmental governance substantially mediate scientific data that inform FCA recommendations. In this way this study illustrates how multiple frameworks--conservationist, neoliberal, or other--can, and often do, intertwine to construct environmental policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on a detailed empirical study of the implementation of the EU's Drinking Water Directive in Estonia and Lithuania in order to understand the factors shaping the Europeanisation of risk regulation regimes in Eastern accession states. Adopting a 'whole-regime' methodological approach, the paper explores the key drivers and constraints shaping the transposition as well as the practical implementation of the law. The study shows how 'conditionality' pressures to adopt the EU acquis in order to access European economic and financial support networks have reinforced, rather than overcome, historically entrenched regulatory cultures. Going beyond wellknown typologies of Europeanisation, the paper identifies a distinctive 'blind-eye' style of Europeanisation in which conditionality pressures have favoured selective compliance with ill-suited EU rules at the expense of tackling significant drinking water risk problems. The paper shows how such symbolic policy practices have been shaped through a combination of the countries' shared Soviet legacies of elite-centred and legalistic governance cultures, the active coping strategies of street-level inspectors, as well as wider sociopolitical contexts that have limited the impact of civil society actors such as scientists, NGOs, and the general public in strengthening risk regulation in the Baltic states. The paper also shows, however, that the different post-Soviet ideological orientations and administrative reform programmes of Eastern European accession states can override their common Soviet legacies and lead to significant national variation in risk regulation processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational certification and ecolabeling programs have become an important new site of environmental governance, as well as an emerging arena for action and conflict in international trade. This paper explores the implementation of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in salmon fisheries in the US state of Alaska in the early 2000s, the growing opposition within the industry to MSC certification through periods of reassessment, and the emergence of an alternative Alaska certification initiative in 2011. It suggests that these shifts were rooted in struggles over understudied third-party certification and labeling processes that we conceptualize as marketized governance. The paper further shows how certification and labeling can obscure and expose competing industry interests and power relations, provoke struggles over fisheries' social representation, and open up novel avenues for cooperation and change, indicating ambiguity in the social and cultural implications of neoliberal modes of governance. Finally, the paper suggests that the ascendancy of the MSC has sparked the emergence of new political and economic geographies of certification and ecolabeling in Alaska and other jurisdictions where place-specific and other initiatives vie for governance and market legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At all levels of governance from international convention to local policy, the regulation of pollution from boats and ships has been steeped in conflict and subject to resistance. Recreational boaters, in particular, are often highly resistant to attempts to regulate their boating activity, particularly on environmental grounds. Such ongoing resistance poses a significant policy compliance challenge. This paper seeks to shed light on this complex, ongoing and broader field of opposition to environmental management by way of a case study analysis of resistance to on-board sewage regulations on the part of recreational boaters in Queensland, Australia. This resistance on the part of ‘everyday’ citizens is examined through the lens of heterotopia. In consequence, the paper can contribute to understandings more broadly of problems beleaguering environmental policy while also attending to the deeply implicated social roles of recreational boating spaces; namely as heterotopias of compensation and/or illusion. It also highlights how these heterotopic positionings are intensified by the scatological orientation of the policy under study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European energy utilities face a range of policy induced challenges that are materially affecting their financial returns. Accordingly, in this paper we examine the impact of liberalization, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and security of supply legislation on European energy utilities' returns between 1996 and 2013. We implement an event study portfolio analysis using a comprehensive list of major regulatory changes, the largest utility sample to date, and a novel asset pricing model that controls for sector-level stock-market, term premium, and commodity risk factors. The results show EU policies that focus on liberalization and energy efficiency have a significant negative impact on the energy sector's financial returns. This reflects changes in the fundamental risk-reward trade-off of European energy utilities and investors' recognition of the economic impact of EU legislations on the sector. Contrary to assertions by the financial press, renewable energy objectives have no significant impact on returns at sector-level; the impact is mostly concentrated on the natural gas utilities. Our results highlight a tension between liberalization and environmental objectives, negatively impacting the sector's ability to raise the estimated $2.2 trillion investment capital needed to ensure reliable and increasingly environmentally-friendly energy supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the import for fiduciary investors (pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds in OECD countries) of companies' environmental performance levels in light of existing and nascent energy-usage and environmental management policies. The study is based on an experiment using a sample of fiduciaries located mainly in Europe, North America, and Australia. Subjects are allocated to one of two groups: one group invests with reference to environmental considerations, while the other tracks a conventional equities index. Responding participants indicate the frequency with which they use nominated sources of information and rate the importance of nominated types of information in their decisions concerning the portfolio. The results suggest that the wider population of fiduciaries considers existing policy measures to be of limited value, yet, on liquidity grounds, might be prepared to take environmental considerations into account in the portfolio construction process. Another contribution of this paper is its framing and consolidating of literature on energy and environmental management policy, environmental investing, and decision psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the rescaling of environmental governance, and with the social construction of environmental and governance scales in particular. With the aid of case-study data from Canada, it is argued that watersheds, as particular forms of rescaled environmental governance, have increased in popularity because of their status as boundary objects: that is, a common concept interpreted differently by different groups. The paper shows how particular features of the watershed approach-namely, their physical size and the shared discursive framings they employ ('stakeholder' and 'integration')- make the watershed concept both cohesive enough to travel among different epistemic communities, and plastic enough to be interpreted and used differently within them. As such, it is suggested that the trend of the uptake of the so-called 'watershed approach' reflects and is shaped by ideologies underpinned by three different, and occasionally competing, epistemic communities: the scientific, neoliberal, and grassroots communities. These arguments corroborate constructivist accounts of the political nature of boundary drawing, bring science into discussion on the relationship between neoliberalism and public participation, and contribute to environmental governance literatures by providing an alternative explanation for the uptake of watersheds in recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the special issue of the journal "Production and Operations Management" calls for papers regarding environmental issues in operations management.

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 introduction of photovoltaic solar household systems (PV/SHSs) into rural electrification programmes in the developing world has brought in its wake dissemination/adoption and sustainability challenges. In order to stimulate wider dissemination, some authors have advocated the greater involvement of the private sector. While the private sector has played a key role, this paper argues that effective government institutional and policy frameworks are the most pivotal elements in the push to disseminate PV/SHSs to the rural poor in the developing world. Using two case studies, the paper contextualises the link between what, at present are inadequate government institutional and policy frameworks and the low level of PV/SHS dissemination in rural Ghana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a summary of recent changes to the legal, regulatory and policy environment affecting generic pharmaceutical manufacturers operating in the Canadian market. It provides a top-line overview of the Canadian pharmaceutical market in terms of generic market share by dollar value and prescriptions filled, and growth in both of those key indicators. This paper describes changes brought into force in October 2006 to regulations of Canada's Patent Act that attempt to limit ‘evergreening’ tactics employed by brand-name drug manufacturers to delay market entry of competing generic products, changes to regulations of Canada's Food and Drugs Act that provide new brand-name pharmaceutical products with eight years of data exclusivity (plus six-month paediatric exclusivity) and the response of the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association (CGPA) to these regulatory changes. This paper also outlines changes to pricing and reimbursement rules for generic pharmaceutical products that are being implemented in the two largest Canadian jurisdictions of Ontario and Québec.Journal of Generic Medicines (2008) 5, 167–174. doi:10.1057/jgm.2008.1; published online 5 February 2008 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the interaction between technology policy and its impact on the full basket of worldwide greenhouse emissions over the 21st century. The heart of the analysis is the Argonne National Laboratory's AMIGA Modeling System, a technology rich, general equilibrium model that (depending on data availability) characterizes as many as 200 sectors of the regional economies. We suggest in this paper that technologies and technology policies exist which could reduce carbon emissions enough to achieve stabilization targets at relatively modest costs given the size of the world economy. This can be accomplished largely through harnessing market forces and creating incentives with the use of efficient prices on greenhouse gas emissions, combined with complementary programs and policies to reduce market failures and to promote new technology improvements and investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a research paper which emphasises that sustainable development means reconciling an aspiration, human wellbeing. The study argues that Great Britain government's approach to this is preventing further increases in unsustainable resource use. The study also argues that sustainability understood as eco-efficiency is impossible. The paper concentrates on domestic energy use. It is suggested that to make any changes, one has to accept the changes politically. The article states that the social and psychological meaning of energy consumption should be understood. Getting more quality of life with less energy services is a way to improve the overall ratio of quality of life to environmental damage, according to the article.

This part of the study covers the method of slope stability analysis and the necessary precautions to he taken to stop mass movement. the details of which have been given in the accompanying paper. Here, backfilling that was planned to provide support against the moving mass and the amount of coal lo be left beneath the backfilling were examined. After starting to apply the most suitable alternative protection plan to restrain sliding by three alternatives in the early 2000s, the inclinometer readings provided supervision guidance over the slope movements. The results and comments on the inclinometer readings are also covered in this paper. Results taken from instrumentation work have been compared with the amount of backfill placed so far and the relationship between small-scale earthquakes that the nearby area of the study and slope movement have been given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successful development of breakthrough products with environmental attributes can not only create competitive advantage through operations excellence but also benefit the environment. This paper proposes a comprehensive scenario-driven method with detailed implementation steps for planning and developing breakthrough products with environmental attributes. A case study based on the development process of biotechnology products is presented to show the applications of the method and the resulting importance of flexibility as a key ingredient in operations strategy. The paper also discusses various operational, marketing, technological, economic, and environmental issues concerning the development of biotechnology products, an area that could have a significant impact on both human health and the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between environmental practices and performance in services and the impact of such practices on the external portion of the service profit chain. Using structural equation modeling, it tests the hypotheses developed with data from the European hospitality industry. The findings suggest that environmental practices are positively related to performance through the mediating effect of enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. The paper's contributions include: the conceptual development of the relationship between environmental practices and performance in services, the incorporation of environmental practices within the service profit chain, and the testing of their impact on customer satisfaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent agreement by European environment ministers on the ground rules for an EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) represents a landmark in the evolution of EU climate policy. But this scheme will be introduced into a crowded 'policy space' within each Member State in which complex interactions between the EU ETS and existing instruments appear unavoidable. This paper explores one aspect of the problems created by the EU ETS for the UK - namely the potential interactions with the UK Renewables Obligation and the UK Energy Efficiency Commitment. Both these instruments have objectives which go beyond the leastcost abatement of carbon emissions and both utilise trading arrangements in which the trading commodity is denominated in MWh rather than tonnes of carbon. The paper explores the potential interactions between the EU ETS and the UK instruments by comparing in turn their scope, timing, objectives and operation. The coexistence of the EU ETS with the RO and EEC is shown to raise three important issues, namely target setting and double counting, double regulation of electricity and the fungibility of trading commodities. The paper concludes that the coexistence of the RO and EEC with the EU ETS is both possible and justifiable, but more attention should be paid to the non-CO2 objectives of each instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The global economy has realized that global warming issues should not be treated with levity. Instead, conscientious and meticulous measures must be taken to address the unwavering ravaging impacts of ecological complications of which technological innovations stand out. Despite the emphasis on technology as a viable pathway to zero emissions by the recent 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), the feasibility of achieving the global target remains vogue from the empirical perspective. Hence, this study presents the first empirically based evidence on the heterogeneous effects of technological innovations on environmental sustainability in Group of Seven (G7) countries from 1995 to 2019. For robust policy insights, the study controls for the functional roles of structural change, environmental policy, biofuel energy, and trade openness in verifying the empirical model. The empirical evidence relies on second-generation estimators comprising cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL), augmented mean group (AMG), common correlated effects mean group (CCEMG), and panel method of moment quantile regression (PMMQR) that are robust for the issues of slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. The main findings show that the various components of technological innovations, structural change, environmental policy, and biofuel energy support environmental sustainability by exerting statistically adverse effects on CO2 emissions. In contrast, trade openness appears as a deterrent to sustainable environment by statistically and positively impacting CO2 emissions. Besides, the findings reveal bidirectional and unidirectional causality pathways in the nexuses investigated for G7. Based on the empirical fallouts, viable policy insights that lead to achieving the net zero emissions target are formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine governmental responses to the environmental problem of waste in the United States. The main thesis of this paper contends that environmental laws, particularly those concerned with addressing the problem of waste, are symbolic exercises because they reaffirm the ideological commitments of the industrial-consumer process, commitments that fail to recognize basic principles of ecology and stir the problem of waste in the first instance. The thesis that garbage laws are mainly symbolic exercises is elaborated in the following manner. First, drawing from the work of other scholars who have invoked the notion of symbolic law, the chief characteristics of the concept are iden tified. Having framed the concept of symbolic law, three ideological com mitments of the industrial-consumer process — belief in human domina tion of nature, creativity as a moral pursuit, and linearity of thought - are described. These ideological commitments contribute directly to the problem of waste through the championing of unadulterated consump tion. Noting some ecological challenges raised by garbage and waste dis posal to these ideological commitments, the next section relates some basic principles of ecology that would serve well as the underpinnings for environmental policy. An examination of the federal government's Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 as well as New York State's Solid Waste Management Act of 1988 confirms, however, that governmental responses to the problem of waste fail to slip free of indus trial-consumer ideological commitments. After assessing the response articulated by these two pieces of legislation, the paper concludes with some observations on symbolic law and environmental problems and with a few suggestions for informing our environmental policy with eco logical principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault's account of the emergence of biopolitics in the late 18th century helps frame the political economy of 'improvements' as an environmental project linked to the well-being of the population. Since the 1970s, biopolitical concerns have shifted towards non-human populations and the reproduction of natural resources and ecosystems. This has become evident in the European fisheries, where after decades of exploitation greatly intensified since the 1960s, the extractive demands of the fishing industry have caught up with the reproductive capacities of most commercially targeted fish stocks. This contradiction has given rise to a new political economy of 'improvements' that seeks to sustain the biological health of commercially targeted fish populations while maintaining an economically profitable fishing industry. Central to this transition is the active role that fishers are expected to play in sustainably managing the fish stocks they exploit while adapting to 'green' market opportunities. Tradeable quota systems, eco-accreditation schemes and community-based resource management have all emerged as managerial strategies for inciting the active participation of fishers in this 'common' project of sustainable development. Drawing on Foucault's perspective of governmentality, this paper argues that these strategies represent distinct but overlapping apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality that are representative of broader tendencies within environmental governance today. [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]