Search

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]

Global warming and consequent climate change have emerged as serious issues and have started featuring on almost all multilateral forums with statements warning the global leadership to get increasingly proactive about addressing the issues. In world politics, countries are viewing climate change as an issue to gain influence in international politics. India is no exception to this rule and has been shaping its role as a rule-shaper and policy advocate and is an active participant in climate change negotiations. This article traces India's role since the talks on climate change began as part of wider environmental concerns. It also enumerates the way global leadership viewed and addressed this pressing issue from time to time. The article provides a brief but critical account of India's policy interventions at global and national levels to appraise India's growing role and relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaster preparedness and relief is a key service provided by the American system of government, but emergency management practices have produced varying outcomes. Based on the existing literature, emergency management, community planning, and a history of racial inequities are inextricably interconnected. Based on the concepts presented by social equity, community planning, emergency management, and environmental policy literature, an interdisciplinary approach was used to create an original checklist of considerations for emergency managers, community planners, and policymakers to use in a collaborative manner to proactively address potential threats to their constituents and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are crucial in crafting effective national climate policies in democratic states. At the same time, there is a practical and academic debate of whether political parties matter for policy output. This article speaks to this debate by investigating the link between what parties say and what parties do with respect to environmental issues. More concretely, it analyzes whether there is a connection between the degree of environmentalism expressed in parties' electoral manifestos and national environmental policy output. Theoretically, the article draws on existing research on program-to-policy linkages in general and for environmental issues specifically to argue that saliency of environmentalism in party manifestos shapes more stringent environmental policies. This argument is empirically tested by combining data on policy stringency with data on manifesto contents for 28 countries for the period 1990–2015. The findings corroborate the main hypothesis, which has implications for understanding the overall potential for political parties to structure national environmental politics. The article concludes by sketching broader implications for research on parties' ability to shape national environmental policy across political systems, and across partisan ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates about "green" authoritarianism have focused on the institutional features of state-led coercive environmentalism. However, the role of various non-state actors in the greening of authoritarian states has remained largely unexplored. Carrying out a case study of Vietnamese‒German development cooperation in the environmental and climate spheres, this article examines the interaction between Vietnamese state institutions and international donors. The article argues that donors play an important role in greening the state policy agenda in Vietnam by funding environmental projects and facilitating knowledge sharing. Nonetheless, donors have very limited freedom to push the political process beyond policymaking and foster meaningful policy implementation. Development practitioners in Vietnam often find themselves caught in a policymaking vacuum, where policymaking is a never-ending process and implementation remains limited. These findings raise broader questions about the effectiveness of climate-related development finance for environmental governance under authoritarian regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a bibliographic listing from the Journal of Planning Literature, covering a wide range of topics related to planning, housing, health, and urban development. The articles explore issues such as affordable housing, urban inequality, climate change, and policy analysis. They also discuss the relationship between housing conditions and health, as well as the role of race and ethnicity in housing disparities. The collection provides valuable insights into these complex issues, employing various research methods and addressing diverse perspectives in a culturally sensitive manner. [Extracted from the article]

Wildlife especially large mammals such as elephants are an important part of an ecosystem providing various ecological functions and services, although they are often involved in human-wildlife conflict. The National Elephant Conservation Center (NECC) in the Pahang state of Peninsular Malaysia was established to ensure that the survival of the Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) in Peninsular Malaysia through direct management, as well as educational and public awareness activities. However, no entrance fee has been imposed since the establishment of the center in 1989 (32 years). This study aimed to determine public willingness to pay for an entrance fee in the NECC. By using the open-ended contingent valuation method (CVM), the mean public willingness to pay for an entrance fee in the NECC during the non-peak season amounted to RM4.65/person/visit whereas it was RM7.09/person/visit during the peak season. The study would serve as a reference for entrance fee implementation for a conservation center as a form of financial aid to sustain the center as well as highlight the importance of public engagement in elephant conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though previous studies have investigated the effect of environmental regulation policy on stock price crash risk, little is known about how the firm-specific environmental punishment would impact stock price crash risks. By applying difference-in-difference method with manually collected firm-specific environmental punishment data for the listed firms in China, our study finds that the implemented environmental punishment leads to larger stock price crash risk accumulation of the punished firms. This effect can be mitigated by better information disclosure behavior, higher media reputation, healthy fundamentals, and optimal capital structure. Our study also finds the consecutive punishment effect only exists in a long period. Our work is among the first to rigorously analyze the effect of firm-specific environmental punishment on firm's stock price crash risk. This research provides relevant policy suggestions on the environmental punishment practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some municipalities adopt ambitious climate action plans and others do not? This study examines United States cities that have signed the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, to identify the factors that have led some of them (37 percent, 63 cities) to adopt ambitious (Net Zero) climate action plans. It finds that two factors make the most difference: (a) whether the city has a paid city employee (or department) dedicated to environmental/energy management and (b) whether the city has a university. Other factors, such as per capita income, city revenue, state funding, size, partisan orientation, and membership in international climate networks, did not significantly influence how ambitious a city's climate action plan was. This study combines a statistical analysis of the signatory cities with a qualitative study Middletown Connecticut to explain why city energy managers and universities can have such a positive effect on city climate action. [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]

Vietnam's economy will be the fastest-growing in 2023 and 2024 compared to ASEAN-5 countries. Since the country is following a development pathway, it is in a position to bet on a Circular Economy (CE), which is a widespread phenomenon for Sustainable Development. This study identifies major environmental challenges and remarks on the evolution of regulations and notable actions in the CE direction. For instance, emphasizes the approximately 4,000 Recycling Craft Villages that poorly implement a CE, focusing on Da Hoi. Finally, this article aims to identify challenges and opportunities, provide recommendations, and portray the future of circularity. Both desk and field research was conducted, including interviews and event attendance. Three principal conclusions are depicted; the limitations in the waste value chain of Recycling Craft Villages, the necessity to minimize air pollution through circularity, and budgetary restrictions are noted as continual hurdles to moving toward circularity. This article will interest policymakers, Vietnamese and international businesses, and academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the decisions in Parliament about the Swedish tax deduction for commuting since the 1980s. The aim is to explain the continuity of the tax regulation despite several attempts from motions in Parliament and public investigations to reform it towards environmental goals, e.g., reduced emissions of CO2. When reforms have been proposed, the political majority in Parliament has regardless of political colour voted against and retreated to the original motives for the tax deduction; economic growth and the enlargement of regional labour markets. The interests of Swedish mass motorisation succeeded in finding the arguments to slow down reforms and at the same time reinforce the path dependency by adding new legitimacy to the regulation. If the attempts to reform the tax deduction had been part of a broader reform of the transport sector and the tax system, they might have succeeded in breaking with the old path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether it pays to be green in the microfinance industry. Environmental issues are important for all businesses around the world, and thus many microfinance institutions (MFIs) started embracing them as an additional objective alongside their traditional social and financial objectives. This article is among the first to test the relationships between environmental performance and both the financial and social performance of MFIs. Using a sample of 234 rated MFIs in 58 countries, we find that being green is associated with higher social and financial performance. Specifically, MFIs with environmental policies have higher financial performance (i.e., higher returns on assets, lower operating costs, and lower cost of capital) and higher social performance (i.e., a higher social rating score) than those without environmental policies. Overall, the results suggest that it pays to be green in the microfinance industry and this should motivate MFIs considering being green to do so. [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]

The document titled "Subject Categories" provides a comprehensive list of topics related to planning that are covered in the Journal of Planning Literature. These topics include history, concepts of planning, policy and planning administration, planning law and legislation, planning and society, development planning, international planning, methodology/quantitative/economic/qualitative, population, economics, physical/environmental, transportation and communication, architecture and urban design, and environmental psychology/environment, behavior, and society. Each category is further divided into subcategories, offering a wide range of subjects for library patrons conducting research on specific planning topics. [Extracted from the article]

Vietnam's economy will be the fastest-growing in 2023 and 2024 compared to ASEAN-5 countries. Since the country is following a development pathway, it is in a position to bet on a Circular Economy (CE), which is a widespread phenomenon for Sustainable Development. This study identifies major environmental challenges and remarks on the evolution of regulations and notable actions in the CE direction. For instance, emphasizes the approximately 4,000 Recycling Craft Villages that poorly implement a CE, focusing on Da Hoi. Finally, this article aims to identify challenges and opportunities, provide recommendations, and portray the future of circularity. Both desk and field research was conducted, including interviews and event attendance. Three principal conclusions are depicted; the limitations in the waste value chain of Recycling Craft Villages, the necessity to minimize air pollution through circularity, and budgetary restrictions are noted as continual hurdles to moving toward circularity. This article will interest policymakers, Vietnamese and international businesses, and academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Special districts are an increasingly important part of the local government equation in the United States, representing over forty percent of local governments. The spread of these governments is controversial, however, as some argue that they will have a negative impact on service delivery, due to a perceived lack of political accountability. Others argue that their focus on single policy issues allow them to more efficiently respond to the citizens they serve. Despite the controversy, only a few studies have quantitatively investigated the differences in service delivery between special district and general purpose governments. Building on Mullin's earlier work, in this research note we investigate the relationship between specialized local government and water utility rates. We find little direct difference between special districts and general-purpose governments, with some minimal support for a conditional relationship between special districts and scarcity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant proportion of the US population does not believe that climate change is a serious problem and immediate action is necessary. We ask whether individuals' experiences with long-run changes in their local climate can override the power of partisanship that appears to dominate this opinion process. We merge individual-level data on climate change perceptions and the main determinants previously identified by the literature with county-level data on an exogenous measure of local climate change. While we find that local climate change significantly affects perceptions and in the expected direction, partisanship and political ideology maintain the strongest effect. We then field a randomized online experiment to test whether partisanship also drives support for pro-climate policies and the willingness to make environmentally friendly individual choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic carbon emissions have the potential to trigger changes in climate and ecosystems that would be catastrophic for the well-being of humans and other species. Widespread shifts in production and consumption patterns are urgently needed to address climate change. Although transnational agreements and national policy are necessary for a transition to a fully decarbonized global economy, fluctuating political priorities and lobbying by vested interests have slowed these efforts. Against this backdrop, bottom-up pressure from social movements and shifting social norms may offer a complementary path to a more sustainable economy. Furthermore, norm change may be an important component of decarbonization policies by accelerating or strengthening the impacts of other demand-side measures. Individual actions and policy support are social processes—they are intimately linked to expectations about the actions and beliefs of others. Although prevailing social norms often reinforce the status quo and unsustainable development pathways, social dynamics can also create widespread and rapid shifts in cultural values and practices, including increasing pressure on politicians to enact ambitious policy. We synthesize literature on social-norm influence, measurement, and change from the perspectives of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics. We discuss the opportunities and challenges for the use of social-norm and social-tipping interventions to promote climate action. Social-norm interventions aimed at addressing climate change or other social dilemmas are promising but no panacea. They require in-depth contextual knowledge, ethical consideration, and situation-specific tailoring and testing to understand whether they can be effectively implemented at scale. Our review aims to provide practitioners with insights and tools to reflect on the promises and pitfalls of such interventions in diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the relationship between haze pollution and industrial agglomeration using particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration data from 269 prefecture-level cities in China between 2007 and 2016. We calculate the industrial agglomeration level using the location entropy method with industrial output as the core variable. We find that the industrial agglomeration effect is adversely affected by increased haze pollution, proving a negative correlation between them. We also compare the effect of haze pollution on industrial agglomeration before and after the 18th National Congress. The comparison shows that the effect of haze pollution on industrial agglomeration during 2012 to 2016 was significantly less than that during 2007 to 2011. Therefore, the industrial agglomeration effect can be strengthened by reducing environmental pollution through vigorous environmental governance efforts. These findings provide empirical evidence for governments' continued implementation of current environmental protection policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We attempt to investigate how and when foreign direct investment (FDI) impacts different types of environmental pollution in host countries. Using provincial data from China between 1995 and 2015, we find that FDI mitigates air pollution, yet it has insignificant effect on water and solid pollution. We further reveal that it is the combination of the technology, scale and structure effects that jointly determines the impact of FDI on environmental pollution. Among them, the technology effect takes the most dominant role, followed by the scale effect and structure effect. In addition, by considering the time effect on environmental policy change, we suggest that the pollution halo effect mainly occurs after air pollution policy revision. Our findings provide insight on the complex mechanisms and theoretical boundary of FDI on different types of environmental pollutants. [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]

Policy and Planning Administration 12-1 Agency Decision Making 12-3 Fiscal Planning/Budgeting 12-4 Policy Analysis 12-5 Politics and Planning 12-6 Municipal/Public Services 13. Housing and Real Estate 30-1 Housing/Real Estate Policy 30-2 Construction/Maintenance/Housing and Building Codes 30-3 Housing/Real Estate Finance and Value 30-4 Home Ownership/Rental Housing 30-5 Housing Rehabilitation 31. 10. Planning History 10-2 History of Planning 10-3 History of Cities and Regions 11. [Extracted from the article]

The COVID-19 pandemic may have altered visitation patterns to parks, with potential effects on human health. Little is known about park use early in the pandemic, how park availability influenced use, and whether park visits accelerated COVID-19 spread. Using weekly cell phone location data for 620 U.S. counties, we show park visits decreased by an average 26% between March 15 and May 9, 2020. Net of weekly trends, park visits were 2.2% lower when stay-at-home orders were in effect, yet increased by 8.4% with school closures and 4.4% with business closures. Park visits decreased less during the pandemic in counties where park availability was high. Levels of park visits were not associated with COVID-19 growth rate or incidence in the following weeks. Thus, parks served as recreation and leisure outlets when schools and businesses closed, especially where parks were more available, with no evidence of park use increasing COVID-19 spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US Clean Water Act of 1972 required cities to build secondary wastewater treatment plant capacity to improve the environment and protect public health. The expansion of the Southeast Pollution Control Plant in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood, illustrates how planners employed rational-comprehensive approaches as the bases for their decision-making, worsening the community’s environmental burdens. This occurred even as the community used recently adopted environmental policy frameworks to mitigate the plant’s consequences. The Clean Water Act should be evaluated on clean water objectives and in terms of how communities were harmed to achieve these environmental goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional Ecological Knowledge has historically been appropriated by White settler societies across the globe. It has an important role to play in environmental decision-making, particularly in climate policy. Due to past colonization and continued neo-colonial pressures, Indigenous women’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge has an even less prominent position in environmental policies. Traditional Ecological Knowledge can help build local expertise, formulate research questions, and provide insights into community adaptation and monitoring. We explore the case of Canadian environmental policy, arguing that although Canadian rhetoric seems to consider Traditional Ecological Knowledge, both women’s and otherwise, it rarely does so. When included, it is only done in a superficial manner within legal requirements. We suggest that the lack of attention paid to Indigenous women’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Canadian environmental decision-making (1) ignores the disproportionate impacts that Indigenous women experience because of climate change, (2) perpetuates gender blindness, and (3) does not recognize the key insights that women’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge can offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nitrogen Critical Loads (NCL), as purported ecological dose-response outcomes for nitrogen deposition from anthropogenic sources, play a central role in environmental policies around the world. In the Netherlands, these NCL are used to assess, via calculations using the model AERIUS, to what extent NCL are exceeded for different habitats as a result of different sources such as industry, agriculture, traffic. NCL are, however, not well defined, and are subject to hitherto unrecognized forms of uncertainty. We will address this with reference to a number of key studies that forms the basis for several NCL. We will subsequently propose amendments that could be applicable to future nitrogen studies and their enhanced relevancy in decision making [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how informing the public about the views of international policy experts shapes public support for international cooperation. Using survey experiments, we test whether variation in levels of support among experts with differing types of domain-specific knowledge can shape public support for a recent and politically salient international treaty: the UNFCCC COP21 Paris Climate Agreement. Our results show that the public is, under certain conditions, deferential to the views of experts, with respondents reporting increasingly higher levels of support for the COP21 agreement as support among experts increased. In addition, we provide suggestive evidence that domain-specific expertise matters: When it comes to support for the COP21 agreement, the public is most sensitive to the views of climate scientists, while exposure to the views of international relations and international economics experts have less dramatic and less consistent effects. Despite these results, we find that it is exposing the public to information about opposition to a proposed treaty among members of relevant epistemic communities that has greatest and most consistent effects. Our findings thus provide new insight into the conditions under which epistemic communities can shape public support for particular policy alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the relationship between welfare regime and climate policy attitudes. The synergy hypothesis suggests that social and environmental policies can reinforce each other. Thus, more universal and generous welfare state model (i.e., welfare regime) is said to provide especially fertile ground for advancing climate policies. Using multilevel modeling and European Social Survey Round 8 data (including 23 countries in Europe and Israel), we test whether this hypothesis applies at the attitudinal level. Moreover, we hypothesize that country-level political trust predicts support for climate policy instruments. The study focuses on three instruments: fossil fuel taxation, subsidizing renewable energy, and banning energy-inefficient household appliances. The results indicate that welfare regime is significantly related to attitudes toward taxation, but less significantly toward subsidizing and banning. Political trust predicted support for all instruments, but the effect was particularly strong for taxation. The results highlight the importance of welfare structures in climate politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

10. Planning History 10-2 History of Planning 10-3 History of Cities and Regions 11. Housing and Real Estate 30-3 Housing/Real Estate Finance and Value 30-4 Home Ownership/Rental Housing 31. Concepts of Planning 11-1 Approaches (Comprehensive/Strategic/Collaborative) 11-2 Planning Theories 11-4 Planning Education 11-6 Negotiation/Mediation/Dispute Resolution 11-7 Citizen Participation 12. [Extracted from the article]

"If we are to have more evidence-based practice, we need more practice-based evidence." This quote has become something of a mantra for the health promotions profession's most pre-eminent scholar, Dr. Lawrence W. Green. This editorial features an interview with Dr. Green and previews the forthcoming 5th edition of Green and Kreuter's seminal health promotion planning textbook. The new title will be Health Program Planning, Implementation and Evaluation: Creating Behavioral, Environmental and Policy Change, with the Johns Hopkins University Press as the new publisher. Co-Editors for this new edition are Larry Green, Andrea Gielen, Judith Ottoson Darleen Peterson, and Marshall Kreuter. This edition shows the vital progression from planning and implementation to evaluation and has further refined and simplified the visual representation of the planning model. The "enabling factors" that will spawn more practice based evidence are discussed. To enable practice-based research will mean that end users of a service or intervention must be taught to be leaders and advocates for approaches that are responsive to their needs, preferences and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Payment for ecosystem services (PES) is an environmental policy looking to improve ecosystem conservation and well-being. Assets have been used to evaluate socioeconomic outcomes of the program; however, the allocation of PES at a household level and its explaining variables have not been addressed. Thus, the aim of this article is to study the allocation of PES in nondurable and durable goods and the determinants of this household decision. Results from the La Antigua watershed located in Mexico indicate that the PES program is primarily used in durable goods, mainly on health, house infrastructure, agricultural inputs, and reforestation. Econometric models show that this allocation to one or several assets depends on the average age of the household head, on participation in a community organization, and on the average income. In contrast, government transfers are not significant. Based on this, policy recommendations are made related to the program's socioeconomic outcomes and alignment with other conditional cash transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Congress passed the 1899 Weed Removal Act, the District of Columbia Health Officer struggled to enforce it. The discourses around the legislation reveal a disconnect between visions for order, beauty, and dignity and the uncontrollable conditions on the ground. Planning visions were for an ordered built environment flanked with orderly "nature," but the weedy materiality of the city thwarted attempts to keep nature in its human-intended place. Through archival research of government reports, newspaper articles, photographs, and cartoons, this article explores how urban weeds complicate discourses of "urban nature" through a case study of early-twentieth-century Washington. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This experiment examines how framing power plant emissions in terms of air pollution or climate change, and in terms of health or environmental impacts, influences perceived benefits and costs of policies to reduce emissions and intentions to take political action that supports such policies. A moderated-mediation model reveals that focusing on air pollution, instead of climate change, has a positive significant indirect influence on intended political action through the serial mediators of perceived benefits and costs. Political ideology moderates the association between perceived benefits and political action. No framing effects are observed in the comparison between health and environmental impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key puzzles of authoritarian environmentalism is its dubious effectiveness due to fragmented interests among different political and market actors, which are often found undermining centrally crafted environmental regulations and targets. China recently launched a series of institutional reforms to fix its notorious local implementation gaps on environmental policies. By setting up a stringent central inspection system and holding frequent inquiry meetings with local government leaders, Beijing aims to reconfigure central–local power relations on environmental governance. We argue that these institutional reforms are essentially transforming environmental governance in China into a highly politicized task by enforcing party disciplines rather than legal frameworks. The aim is to rein environmental officers and hold local political leaders accountable. These reforms may significantly reduce local protectionism, yet such highly politicized approach based on coercive party rules and disciplines bears the risk of weakening the role of legal enforcement and can breed discontent among local officers. Consequently, how these new reforms can achieve a desirable central–local relation for addressing China's environmental crisis in the long run is far from certain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decarbonization, environmental protection, and sustainable development are more topical than ever. Despite long-standing debates about the regressive profile of environmental taxes, the welfare state’s role in buffering adverse distributive impacts of climate policy is largely unexplored. We examine if social policy shields households from falling into poverty due to environmental taxes tied to consumption. We specifically focus on the importance of income replacement in social insurance and social assistance. To enable detailed assessments of the distributive outcomes of environmental policy, we impute environmental taxes into the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Our comparative analysis of 26 European countries indicates that the welfare state protects households from relative income poverty due to environmental taxes. Moreover, comparisons between educational groups suggest that both social insurance and social assistance play different yet complementary roles in reducing socio-economic gradients in poverty related to environmental taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of the Nordic countries on the European Union's (EU's) policy processes has been researched from various angles, but there is a lack of research that comprehensively examines all policy positions advanced by Nordic actors within a given policy context. This article introduces a new design for studying policy positions and influence in the EU and examines the phenomenon from a multilevel perspective using an original data set compiled in connection to three directives: the Floods Directive on the assessment and management of flood risks, the Environmental Liability Directive, and the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive. The analysis reveals that the Nordic countries follow a certain pattern of influencing EU policy that deviates from other states participating in the consultations. Nordic governmental actors exert a strong technical but weak directional influence in the chosen context but are, overall, more successful than Nordic organizational actors at influencing the policy process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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]

Vacant lots can attract debris, are often covered with overgrown vegetation, and at times, serve as hot spots for crime. Given the alignments associated with vacant lots, cities often try to revitalize or restore vacant lots to usable parcels. However, there is little research that examines the relationship between revitalization efforts for vacant lots and crime. This study seeks to determine how Houston HOPE—a revitalization project—affects crime trends within Houston, Texas. Data from the Houston Police Department are used to analyze the progress in the HOPE intervention on violent and property crime, and nuisance calls for service using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) modeling. We find that, for some HOPE areas, violent and property crimes and nuisance calls for service decreased, whereas, in other HOPE areas, those crimes and calls increased. Our results provide mixed support for the HOPE intervention and the utility of neighborhood revitalization efforts to influence criminal behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the relationship between the energy efficiency and the stringency of environmental and market regulation in the electricity sectors has been analyzed. Using 19 European Union countries (2006--2014), we decomposed the environmental policy stringency index, the OECD regulatory indicators and the total factor productivity growth to highlight the complexity of the relations between electricity sector and regulatory policies. In the first stage we compute the three main components of total factor productivity. These three efficiency measures are used in the second stage to assess the impact of the regulatory policies on the total factor productivity also controlling for spatial effect. Results suggest that market and environmental regulations have not unidirectional impacts on the three components of total factor productivity. Pure and scale efficiency index are negatively affected by sectorial regulation that positively affect the shift of technological frontier. Environmental policy negatively affects the shift of the efficient frontier, but has a positive effect on the scale efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advocates for eating locally raised animals claim that their practice is helpful in protecting the environment. However, the opposite is true. As such, their references to "nature" have less to do with a scientific stable ecosystem and, instead, represent a call for a return to a "natural" order of human's supposedly benevolent domain over other animals. Instead of a science-based environmental policy, local meat operates as a type of "postcommodity fetish." It is because of the desire to escape the confines of consumerist culture, to return to romanticized idea of Edenic-purity, which underlies the desire to purchase "locally" produced animal products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical commentaries have often treated the smart city as a potentially problematic 'top down' tendency within policy-making and urban planning, which appears to serve the interests of already powerful corporate and political actors. This article, however, positions the smart city as significant in its implicit rejection of the strong normativity of traditional technologies of planning, in favour of an ontology of efficiency and emergence. It explores a series of prominent UK smart city initiatives (in Bristol, Manchester and Milton Keynes) as bundles of experimental local practices, drawing on the literature pointing to a growing valorisation of the 'experimental' over strong policy commitments in urban governance. It departs from this literature, however, by reading contemporary 'smart experiments' through Shapin and Schafer's work on the emergence of 17th-century science, to advance a transhistorical understanding of experimentation as oriented towards societal reordering. From this perspective, the UK smart city merits attention primarily as an indicator of a wider set of shifts in approaches to governance. Its pragmatic orientation sits uneasily alongside ambitions to 'standardise' smart and sustainable urban development; and raises questions about the conscious overlap between the stated practical ambitions of smart city initiatives and pre-existing environmental and social policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suburban residents in the Detroit metropolitan area practiced a homeowner environmentalism that sought protection of property values, local sovereignty, and a bucolic aesthetic, while rejecting the sacrifice of political power or resources to the larger region. Such homeowner activism deftly navigated a new political terrain created in the wake of passage of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Using three case studies of organizations successfully defying major regional developments, this article illustrates the regional planning challenges created in the context of increasing environmental activism and ongoing urban crisis in Detroit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local governments play a large, if understudied, role in the implementation of environmental policy in the United States. The major environmental statutes outline explicit responsibilities for the federal and state governments in enforcement under a cooperative federalism framework, and a literature on environmental federalism has developed looking at how variables at the state level affect implementation. Largely ignored by this literature is the important part local governments play in implementation. This study explores one way local politics may influence implementation, investigating the effect of citizen preferences on municipal compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The findings show that utilities in Democratic leaning areas violate the SDWA less frequently than those in Republican leaning areas. The results suggest that just as politics influence environmental policy implementation at the federal and state levels, the local role in environmental policy is inherently tied to the political incentives facing municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of psychological restoration in urban settings has undergone significant growth in recent years. The aim of this paper is to develop an instrument for the objective evaluation of the restorative potential of urban public spaces. Perceived restoration scales and a large number of systematic social observation instruments were reviewed, selecting items that might be suitable for the aims of this study and adding other items designed ad hoc. The resulting tool is made up of 183 items, grouped into 12 domains. The final format of the instrument was used by a group of four evaluators in a total of six urban squares. This paper reports the statistics obtained for the internal consistency of the instrument (inter-judge agreement) and convergent validity through correlations of the objective scores from each public square with the perceived and experienced restoration of a sample of users of said public squares (N = 296). The tool delivered an adequate level of reliability, and its scores were related to restoration measures, although the size of this association was small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eco-efficiency measures if economic growth and environmental protection are effectively balanced. To understand the path of green urban growth in China, this article examines the converging patterns of eco-efficiency for 191 Chinese cities within 2003 and 2013. Two types of modified Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods and spatial modeling approach are adopted in empirical analyses, with cities grouped based on three types of heterogeneities that facilitate the formation of potential convergence clubs. We find that major Chinese cities are β-converging in their eco-efficiency scores and are forming place-based convergence clubs in terms of geographical location, environmental policy, and resource endowments. Less efficient clubs are converging at a faster speed toward low-level steady states, while more efficient clubs are reaching separate high-level equilibria with relatively slow rates and longer half-life. We further raise corresponding policy implications that aim at retarding or reversing the ongoing trend of eco-efficiency deterioration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, the Reef has been a site where Australian environmental policy has flourished, mirroring global environmental policy seeking to 'balance' human activity through 'ecologically sustainable development'. The article examines the parallel and intersecting processes of modern environmental policy and news media practice in the context of the Reef to unveil how Australia's news media are communicating critical moments in the protection of the Reef. Through two key conservation moments – the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger – the article examines the role of news media in different geographic contexts, highlighting the complex politics of protection from early conservation campaigns to the contemporary era of protecting the Reef in the context of global environmental crisis. We identify how ecologically sustainable development discourses can be used to communicate positions that challenge and discredit policy initiatives aimed at protecting natural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]