Search

Orthodox depictions of a fraught labour–environmental relationship privileging class, ideological and programmatic differences are problematised by newly quantified evidence of British unions' pro-environmental policy-making since 1967. The following narrative blends widely accepted accounts of the fortunes of both movements with an evaluation of Britain's shifting political opportunity structure and coalition theory to identify an alternative range of constraints and opportunities influencing the propensity and capacity of both movements to interact effectively, culminating recently in unions' emergence as environmental actors in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years within the UK, behaviour change as a policy tool has gained popularity. Concurrently, the role of local authorities in both tackling unsustainability and reducing carbon emissions has become more prominent. This paper describes a recent study in the UK that aims to understand how local authorities are working to tackle unsustainability and encourage pro-environmental behaviour change in the population. Through interviews with local authority sustainability officers from London, this paper reviews the extent of sustainability work currently being undertaken by local authorities to assist residents transition to a more sustainable lifestyle. The study discusses key findings from the interviews, drawing on the commonalities and factors that influence local authority sustainability programmes. The key finding from these interviews is that there is a need for more robust monitoring and evaluation of local authority sustainability programmes. Robust evaluation would improve understanding of the potential contribution that local authority sustainability work could make towards addressing unsustainability and meeting national emission reduction targets. In addition, it would assist the development of the evidence-base on behaviour change interventions and their effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on an empirical study of environmental policies in Manchester (UK) and Saint-Etienne (France), this article attempts to provide a periodization of the evolution of the management of urban environmental issues. The periodization traces the shift in discourse from a focus on ‘local environment’ to ‘sustainable urban development’. Three main sequences are identified corresponding to three different ways of tackling environmental issues covering a period from the late 1970s up to the present. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it will use environmental policies as a tool to understand the transformations of urban governance, and in particular the transformations of the actors involved in policy-making. Second, it will show how sustainable development policies are used by local elites to neutralize urban conflicts by excluding environmental grassroots movements from the management of environmental issues. Finally, the article will discuss how this marginalization should be considered as a sign of the emergence of a post-democratic era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategic legal activity of the environmental movement in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years. Environmental non-governmental organizations ( NGOs) have increasingly turned to the courts in pursuit of their policy goals, despite significant losses on substantive legal issues, difficulties gaining standing and high costs awarded against them under the 'loser pays' system. This presents a puzzle: why does the movement continue to pursue legal action in the face of what activists claim is a hostile legal opportunity structure ( LOS)? This study explores this seeming paradox using a single-country, cross-temporal comparative approach, an original dataset of legal cases taken by NGOs as well as qualitative case studies of strategic litigation. It highlights the agency the movement exhibits within opportunity structures and suggests that NGOs that use litigation are able to highlight the failings of the existing system and improve future access to justice for themselves and other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a peak in activism against climate change in the UK, new environmental direct action networks have not yet received much academic attention. Taking perhaps the most prominent of such networks – the Camp for Climate Action – which held several high-profile protest events between 2006 and 2011 as a case study, and using a theoretical framework that understands society as being distinctly ‘post-political’ in character, we ask questions about the knowledge claims that form the foundations of radical environmental politics. Drawing on published statements and press releases, as well as from our insights as active participants in the Camp, we analyse the strategy of environmental protest where climate change has become its focus. The Camp for Climate Action was a contested political arena. We argue that the Camp's strategy was characterised by ‘scientised’, ‘post-political’ politics which operated within an ethical framework that prescribed individual responsibility as the primary basis for action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the concept of environmental justice with particular reference to its development in the UK. The paper analyses the empirical evidence behind environmental justice and argues that, while the body of evidence is compelling, it simultaneously highlights a number of limitations. Moreover, the paper offers an analysis of the multiple responses taken at official and non-governmental organisation levels to environmental justice. The paper argues that often these responses are vague and diverse, and run the risk of rendering environmental justice, as a concept, ineffective. Finally, the paper discusses what role the law may be able to play in shaping environmental justice debates in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the publication of the new waste strategy plan of the British government in May 2007 in Great Britain. The strategy represents part of the execution of the Framework Directive on Waste (WFD) and waste management plan for aims of WFD. The strategy applies the well-established notion of waste hierarchy, with waste prevention as the preferred option. The strategy also highlights the economic benefit to be derived from waste reduction.

The search for effective and efficient climate policy has led to a major expansion in the use of market-based instruments and voluntary agreements (New Environmental Policy Instruments [NEPIs]) at national and international levels. Yet, despite the prevalence of these instruments as an outcropping of the broader shift toward neoliberal approaches to environmental policies, tremendous diversity exists in the way signatories to the Kyoto Protocol have deployed NEPIs. Drawing on recent geographical and political science research on the neoliberalization of nature, this article reexamines reasons for geographical variations in market environmentalism and, in particular, the role of national policy styles in refracting neoliberal influence on environmental policy. In so doing, I argue that policy styles are too frequently conceptualized in terms of state processes, overlooking complex and territorialized social relations between regulators and regulated parties. To illustrate this claim, I compare the implementation of climate policy in the United Kingdom and Germany, exploring the effects of national policy styles on NEPI deployment, factors contributing to industry reactions to market-based and voluntary measures, and how national policy styles color these evaluations. This is used to argue that understanding geographical variations in market environmentalism requires greater appreciation of the role of industry groups in the creation, defense, and evolution of national policy styles. I conclude by reflecting on the study's implications for the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two landmark cases involving contaminated land in the UK. As the UK'S contaminated land regime is relatively new there has only been two appeal cases to date. This article considers how these two cases impact on the interpretation and application of liability-determining provisions of the contaminated land regime. In addition, practical implications of these judgments are also discussed. Finally, we review how the cases can be reconciled and what this might mean for the regime's future amid effectiveness. The two recent High Court cases involving the contaminated land regime (Part IIA of the Environmental Protection Act 1990), are: • R (on the application of the National Grid Gas plc) (formerly Transco Plc) v Environment Agency (2006), ("the National Grid Gas case"); and • Circular Facilities (London) Ltd v Sevenoaks 'District Council (2005), (the "circular Facilities" case). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically analyses the future impact of Environmental Liability Directive' in the UK and the issues covering implementation of the Directive in the UK. The article discusses the problems created by the Directive and provides recommendations on how it should be transposed in the UK. It also considers whether insurance can cover the increased risks imposed on UK operators by the Directive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the role of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in debates about environmental science and knowledge, using empirical evidence from in-depth interviews with a range of NGOs involved in the waste debate in the United Kingdom. We discuss theoretical issues of scientific boundary-work and the construction of expertise and socially distributed knowledge, and then apply these to our empirical evidence. Our conclusions are that NGOs continue to subscribe to the notion of the preeminent authority of science in environmental debates, but also work partly in a more diverse, highly networked world of knowledge production which requires them to be pragmatic and versatile in how they legitimate knowledge from various sources. Hence, scientific knowledge is highly contingent in its authority, and dependent upon continual (re)negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study with residents living in six deprived neighbourhoods in the UK and the front-line workers and local policymakers responsible for the renewal of these areas. The study was an attempt to raise awareness of local environmental concerns in the context of a national and local policy agenda, which has, until recently, largely overlooked the impacts of degraded environments on the lives and activities of the people who live in them. A key aim for the study was to raise people's concerns with local decision-makers and examine how far these might be addressed through the existing financial, administrative and legislative arrangements for neighbourhood renewal in the UK, namely Local Strategic Partnerships. The research was designed to provide practical lessons and policy recommendations for others wishing to raise the profile of environmental justice in the context of neighbourhood level regeneration projects, in both the UK and elsewhere in the ‘developed’ world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces papers which examined how much progress the concept of environmental justice has made in Great Britain. From being outside mainstream environmental agendas, concepts of environmental equity and justice now occupy a central position in government policy and have been the subject to growing research scrutiny. Drawing on papers first presented in a dedicated session on environmental justice organized by the Planning and Environment Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers at the International Geographical Congress, held in Glasgow in August 2004, the issue provides an opportunity to explore and reflect upon the recent development of environmental justice concerns in the country. The concept of environmental justice was first popularized and politicized by the emergence of the environmental justice movement, and the increasing space for political and legal contestation of claimed environmental injustices, in the U.S. In Great Britain, the concept has taken a different path, increasingly seen as a means of reconciling the sustainable development agenda with that of social justice.

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with debates over the implementation of sustainability objectives. In particular, it focuses on policies that address the 'value--action gap' in environmental policy. Using evidence from the author's research connected with the UK Going for Green Sustainable Communities Project in Huntingdonshire, the paper highlights the tensions between national policies that are based on an 'information deficit' model of participation, and local research and experience that posits a more complex relationship between individuals and institutions. While this suggests the need to develop more differentiated policies based on the restructuring of socioeconomic and political institutions, the paper warns against knee-jerk calls for more local, community or public participation which simply replace one set of generalised appeals with another. The paper concludes that greater emphasis must be placed on the negotiation of partnerships that are more sensitive to local diversity, and which involve a more equitable distribution of responsibility between different environmental stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports how the Green Party's success in the June Euro-elections stunned British policymakers and emphasized the extent of public concern for environmental issues. Politicians and the media that are finally acknowledging the importance of these issues; Voting statistics.

The ways in which issues of differential times and time-scales make themselves felt in environmental politics are explored. Official and industrial `control' of time-scales within environmental regulatory processes is seen to be an important determinant of the forms such politics take in countries like the UK. It is argued that the opening up of `time' debates carries far-reaching and positive implications for `sustainability' aspirations in the industrial world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents several environmental questions formulated by the British environmental policy makers as an exercise of role-reversing. These questions, labeled as "high policy relevance," are aimed to facilitate the process of whittling down the number of questions. Among the questions formulated are centered on the time it takes for the seabed to recover from disturbance such as dredging, wind-farm construction, and oil and gas extraction; the impacts of recreational activities on biodiversity; the effects of domestic cats on vertebrate populations in rural and urban environments; the consequences for biodiversity of changes in water quality and sedimentation in rivers; and on the reason why woodland birds declined.

The article reports on the reviving plans for a dam across the Severn estuary, which separates southwest England from south Wales in Great Britain. Graham Wynne, of Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), stated that the plan was expensive and massively damaging proposal cannot be justified on economic grounds. It cites that the Severn barrage would have locks to accommodate ships and perhaps a road link along its top. The consultancy group Frontier Economics argued that there was no compelling reason for the government to bankroll a project that the private sector could do well, and concluded that public money would be better spent on other types of renewable project.

The article focuses on the efforts of ensuring capabilities to produce radical new designs of passenger aircraft that will meet strict global rules controlling the influence on climate change in Great Britain. The author predicted of a four-fold growth in global airline traffic an the commercial incentive for the civil aerospace industry to grasp future technologies. In an effort to achieve better design efficiency, a policy of de-risking of new technologies is necessary to ease the technical and commercial uncertainties of introducing new designs of components. However, the missions of oxides of nitrogen are heading steadily in the right direction. The Advisory Council for Aeronautical Research in Europe aims to develop radically cleaner, quieter aircraft for 2020. Significantly, the new aircrafts will have revolutionary designs which features a doomed swept-wing design.