Environmental Science & Policy最新文献

Combining the Multiple Streams Framework and Rose et al.’s (2020) tips for environmentalists to approach policy windows, we examined which strategies policy entrepreneurs from Brazil’s National Cabotage Program and National Biofuels Policy adopted to ensure their approval. In the National Cabotage Program, the employment by the Ministry of Infrastructure of the capacities to foresee and create a policy window, reflected in the decision to create a Navigation and Waterways Department, and to persevere, continuously negotiating the draft bill of the Program with the executive and the legislative branches, contributed to policy approval. In the National Biofuels Policy, the employment of the capacities to respond by the association of sugarcane producers, through sending a market-based proposal to a call for policy proposals opened by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and to frame, by emphasizing the biofuel policy as a solution for Brazil to attain its climate commitments, was key, sparing the use of other strategies. The findings suggest that more than one combination of strategies can lead to policy approval, whereas it is not necessary to adopt all of them in a single process, with seeming compensation between them. Future studies could investigate the outcomes of different combinations of capabilities and qualities of public policy entrepreneurs in other public policy processes.

Green Infrastructure (GI) is a strategically planned network delivering and enhancing diverse ecosystem services whilst preventing further biodiversity loss. Although not mandatory for EU members to implement GI, it is increasingly advocated as a tool for landscape planning. In 2016, the Swedish Government mandated the County Administrative Boards (CABs) to design regional GI plans using a collaborative process. This study explored the GI collaborative process in the region of Scania in southern Sweden, focusing on forest as an important component of Swedish landscapes. We interviewed 14 different stakeholders who participated in the process, and analysed the preconditions, inner workings and outcomes of collaborative GI planning. Despite remarkably different expectations, the perceived outcomes were consistent. Most stakeholders perceived the process as mainly informational rather than deliberative and, in general, use of the GI plan was limited. Despite successful finalisation of the plan, collaboration as a long-term process has not been achieved, which may limit the realisation of activities that foster GI. Scania’s GI planning illustrates the defects of top-down approaches with insufficient resources, failing to address the stakeholders’ trust and positioning. A lack of inclusivity and deliberation undermine the legitimacy of collaborative processes, discrediting the very concept of GI in Sweden. Our analysis indicates that a genuine collaborative process and a long-term commitment to implementing GI is unachievable without sustained and substantial governmental funding, capacity development at the lead agency, thorough consideration of prehistory, and targeted measures to increase trust among stakeholders.

While climate adaptation planning and implementation is gradually increasing across the globe, there is a documented gap between what is done and what needs to be done. Researchers have documented climate adaptation efforts at the strategic policy-making level and in urban planning practices, but less is known about how cities navigate the intricacies of climate adaptation policy-progression in the existing built environment. Contributing to the analytical unpacking of how to reduce policy implementation gaps, this paper targets ten Swedish early adopter cities seeking to proactively and pragmatically progress with their climate adaptation efforts from policy-formation to implementation in the urban built environment. Qualitative analyses of interviews and policy-documents illustrate that the cities, despite their early adopter status, struggle with stepwise policy-progression and get stuck when approaching implementation. Ensuring appropriate climate adaptation in the existing urban built environment becomes problematic due to current legal distribution of responsibilities, diverse land-ownership patterns and path-dependent structures and configurations within cities that are dense, intricate and tightly developed over of time. We identify three pragmatic action-strategies adopted to create solution space and allowing the cities to proceed: event-driven, target-driven and opportunity-driven climate adaptation, each having their advantages and disadvantages for ensuring urban robustness, as well as different requirements for up-scaling. The analysis enables important lessons of climate adaptation policy-progression, the promise and pitfalls of stepwise adaptation and the necessity of pragmatic muddling that is required to make climate adaptation work in the existing urban built environment.

In sub-Saharan Africa, four out of five people use biomass fuels for household energy, with associated health and environmental problems. Interventions for clean cooking transitions tend to simplify agency and adoption motivations, with knowledge gaps in policy design. Drawing perspectives from own research from Tanzania, we focus on four key dimensions: household energy needs, climate, health, and the policy context. Six recommendations are highlighted for future research to inform evidence-based policy. First, gender is intrinsically associated with energy use patterns contradicting the common narrative that modern energy technologies can empower women. Second, fuel stacking is very common, and higher quality data is needed to better assess health and climate impacts from the energy use mix. Third, fossil LPG results in lower climate impacts than biomass energy, especially in contexts with high rates of deforestation. This challenges the dichotomy of renewable and non-renewable energy. Fourth, we query the polarity of clean vs. non-clean fuels, with charcoal found to be less polluting indoors once the stove has been lit outside. Fifth, energy policy effectiveness may be increased by combining Pay-As-You-Go fuel technologies with social services and policies beyond the energy sector. Sixth; poverty exacerbates the challenges of making decisions on essential household expenditure. Hence, policies should address poverty to ensure widespread adoption of clean fuels. The policy perspectives presented here are relevant for low and middle-income countries where the majority of the population relies on biomass fuels for their household energy.

Western wildfires present a complex sustainability challenge characterized by more severe fires and escalating risks. To mitigate western wildfire risks, collaborative management practices need to transform the processes involved in knowledge production, seizing the opportunities and overcoming obstacles associated with actors’ multiple understandings. Knowledge co-production represents an increasingly referenced process for bringing together diverse actors, including scientists from different disciplines and non-scientists, to construct place-based and action-oriented knowledge. While knowledge co-production scholarship emphasizes the importance of recognizing and legitimizing multiple understandings, processes for attending to multiple understandings lack a systematic exploratory method for identifying and characterizing what those understandings are. We employed a narrative analysis to empirically investigate multiple understandings within the context of western wildfire challenges. Based on sixty semi-structured interviews with influential actors, we identified nine social narratives that capture distinctions in the connections actors make between the causes, consequences, and solutions to wildfire challenges, in the spatial and temporal scale they emphasize, in the way they frame the challenge, and in the language they use. We also found differences in how actors demarcate social narratives' credibility, legitimacy, and saliency. Our research suggests that analyzing social narratives fills an essential gap in practice by providing a pragmatic exploratory process for identifying and characterizing actors’ multiple understandings.

The dialogue on solutions to plastic pollution to date has largely focussed on targeting commonly found items or areas where large volumes of litter accumulate in the environment. The need to identify better solutions to reduce plastic pollution at the global scale has been highlighted in recent G7 and G20 discussions. Negotiations are underway for a global, legally-binding Plastics Treaty that countries will hopefully agree on, however, the local implementation of the global agreement will be challenging and complex. Cultural norms and values are likely to influence the adoption of new waste disposal practices and rules, and also impact industry and consumer behaviour and compliance more generally. To date, cultural norms and values have not entered the global solution dialogue. If a global treaty to reduce plastic pollution is to succeed, understanding the potential impact of these cultural dimensions on the potential effectiveness of implementing the agreement is crucial. Building upon the cross-culture research, this paper describes the potential impact of failing to consider cultural aspects in the decision-making process and implementation of the Global Plastics Treaty. As Treaty negotiations are underway, actively considering and addressing the influence of culture will contribute to more inclusive Treaty obligations. This in turn could influence new national plans of action, reporting, compliance and monitoring of plastic pollution by signatory member states.

Nature is valuable in diverse ways, including as a source of food and materials, as part of human cultures and identities, and as a community of living beings with their own interests and welfare. Since its formal establishment in 2012, IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) has endeavoured to synthesise this diversity of values, and to present it in policy-relevant ways. In this Perspective article, I propose and justify three major improvements to IPBES’ treatment of values, with special focus on its Conceptual Framework and Values Assessment. First, a better alternative must be found to the recently proposed concept of ‘relational values’ because, paradoxically, this proposed concept constrains rather than promotes relational thinking, as well as entrenching dualisms between humans and nature. Second, IPBES must pay greater attention to the negative impacts of nature (its disvalues); failure to do so risks imbalanced environmental policies, as well as the alienation of people who have been harmed by nature and by environmental decision-making. Third, and to fully account for the diverse ways in which nature matters, IPBES must go beyond values and disvalues, and consider nature’s status, bonds, and the trauma that can result from natural events and environmental degradation. It is only by reworking its frameworks and assessments in these three ways that IPBES can make full progress toward fairer and more effective environmental policy.

Citizen science is growing rapidly with positive outcomes documented for ecological research, conservation, policy, innovation, and increased citizen stewardship. This rapid increase provides an opportunity to reflect on the characteristics of citizen science projects and determine their diverse goals, practices and outcomes. This paper focuses on the perspective of those initiating and leading citizen science projects in the third largest growing citizen science landscape – Australia, discussing the varying goals, outcomes and impacts. Findings from the statistical and thematic analysis of an online questionnaire (for multiple-choice and open-ended questions respectively), demonstrate the Australian citizen science landscape as growing exponentially, dominated by ecological and biodiversity projects, yet mostly local in scope and limited in numbers of participants. Individual and community goals such as education, raising awareness and public engagement, were found to be the focus of most citizen science projects, whilst scientific developments and policy advancement were often considered secondary goals. Projects leaders describe inherent tensions in managing projects and balancing their many goals. For example, public engagement was concurrently considered a benefit of citizen science enabling non-scientists participation in science discourse and research, and a challenge in recruitment, retention and ongoing communication with citizens scientists. The findings underscore the imperative of striking a balance between scientific rigor, policy objectives and societal aims, for advancing the vision of citizen science and maximizing its effectiveness and ecological impact. This relevance extends globally, urging nations from the Global North to the Global South, to consider replicating and adapting these approaches for broader societal benefit.

Traditional and local knowledge (TLK) can be instrumental in mitigating the risks of disasters. There are calls to prioritize such knowledge to promote community resilience against disasters. This study examines the integration of TLK into disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies in Nepal, India and Bangladesh using a qualitative content analysis. We evaluated the level of integration in three components: policy priority, policy governance, and policy integration. Policy priority included five criteria and showed that India has better integrated TLK into national policies, followed by Nepal, and Bangladesh. None of the countries met our criteria for policy governance. Nepal and India emphasize community-based disaster management, combining traditional knowledge with modern technologies. However, policies are silent about the pathways of such integration, the governance mechanisms have no provision for community participation, nor are any integration tools proposed to promote such practices. Overall, the DRR policies have acknowledged the need to engage with TLK, but much more work is needed to prioritize TLK integration, which requires integration tools (e.g., legal, economic and institutional) and resources.

Academic and non-academic societal actors alike are seeking to optimize the ways in which scientific research may contribute to sustainable development, for which a diverse range of research uptake strategies have been developed. Yet, while the literature emphasizes that the appropriateness of research uptake strategies depends on the context in which they are applied, designing appropriate research uptake strategies to fit a specific context remains a challenging decision-making task for many researchers. In this paper, we conceptualize appropriate research uptake strategies to be those that align with the research and societal sustainability contexts in which they are applied and account for the interactions that emerge between these two contexts. With the aim of supporting researchers in designing more appropriate research uptake strategies in a wide range of contexts, we then build on this conceptualization to propose an appropriateness-typology distinguishing between four broad research uptake approaches: the knowledge transfer approach; the commissioned research approach; the direct engagement approach; and the co-production approach. The typology matches each approach to the dynamic research and societal sustainability contexts in which it is most likely to be appropriate, while seeking to accommodate nuanced understandings of how researchers may approach uptake given different contexts and at the same time aiming at parsimony. By explicitly conceptualizing the role of context in research uptake decision-making and taking a first step towards an appropriateness-typology of research uptake, we hope to empower researchers to design more context-appropriate research uptake strategies such as to better contribute to sustainable development.