Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

Empirical studies on agency in green path development (GPD) have underexplored non-firm actors' roles. Through a semi-structured interview, this article provides insight into how the City of Vaasa exercises agency toward developing the battery industry and the concomitant effects. The findings reveal that the City of Vaasa provides place-based leadership, for example, through a local-based initiative, that is, the GigaVaasa, as a platform to increase participation and coordinate the actions of public and private actors. As an institutional entrepreneur, they govern the issuance of operating licenses to optimize their economic interest; as innovative entrepreneur, they strategically plan and coordinate infrastructure development to increase the region's attractiveness to external investors and talents. The City of Vaasa agency increases the chances for the region to participate in the global battery market and stimulate the region's economic development. Nonetheless, environmental sustainability concerns remain a profound unintended effect. Conceptually, the article introduces the agency cyclicality and synchronization model to enhance the understanding of the interplay and effect of agency in an emerging green industry's development trajectory.

A gap exists in the literature on how to implement theories of knowledge exchange (KE) into practice within an environmental management context. To support the improved practice of KE, we conducted a scoping literature review evaluating 56 empirical case studies globally to identify enabling conditions for implementing effective KE. Identified enabling conditions were organized into a core capacities framework, which highlighted essential elements of effective KE from organizational, individual, financial, material, practical, political, and social capacity dimensions. Results show that major enablers to effective KE relate to practitioners' individual and organizational capacity including the ability of practitioners (often boundary spanners) to establish trust with relevant actors through their interpersonal relationships and possessing sufficient background knowledge and skills to facilitate collaborations across disciplines and sectors. We also identified main challenges to engaging in KE (e.g., insufficient long- term funding for projects, lack of interpersonal skills for KE practitioners to build relationships and network, and inadequate background knowledge for practitioners to exchange knowledge in an accessible manner), and the outcomes and impacts that can emerge from effective KE work. We find that practitioners often perform quantitative evaluations that provide instantaneous and measurable impacts for the effectiveness of KE, but do not capture the impact of interpersonal relationships and trust that are best achieved through qualitative approaches. Lastly, the synthesis of enablers, challenges, outcomes, and impacts presented in this paper can be a resource for practitioners to identify what enablers may be missing from their KE strategies and in what capacity the KE work can be strengthened.

Turning cities socio-ecologically resilient is one of the pressing challenges in the face of ongoing climate change and accompanying extreme weather events. Despite concentrated efforts within specific urban domains, there exists a necessity for a coordinating mechanism that can concurrently monitor signals of slowly maturing long-term crises, such as global warming and swiftly intervene to mitigate urgent threats, such as catastrophic floods. This article explores the potential of high reliability principles to inform such a governance mechanism through a novel policy operations room (POR) framework, conceptualizing urban strategic goals as critical infrastructure. We analyze the conditions for integrating elements from top-down crisis management with bottom-up participatory scenario exercises and policy simulations in urban governance. Based on pre- and post-POR interviews and meeting transcripts in three Finnish cities we examine the regulative, normative, and cognitive aspects of integration. The analysis indicates that the implementation of a high reliability framework in urban settings can provide valuable support for addressing challenges induced by climate change.

Policy experimentation has emerged globally as a novel governance approach to address complex socio-environmental problems. In the climate adaptation literature, policy experiments that test technical and governance innovations on a small scale in real-world conditions are increasingly utilized to explore new pathways for climate adaptation. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how policy experiments lead to transformative change in climate adaptation governance, particularly regarding their role as a change strategy. This systematic literature review aims to thoroughly investigate the topic by mapping the empirical characteristics of policy experiments, their role and their outcomes. An existing analytical framework was adapted to fulfill this objective by qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing 27 empirical papers. The findings reveal that policy experiments in climate adaptation often address multiple climate hazards, sectors and actors, yet they are spatially and temporally limited, being predominantly located in Europe. Moreover, the study highlights the transformative potential of policy experiments in climate adaptation governance, emphasizing their effectiveness in testing technical and governing innovations, as well as implementing adaptation policies. Policy experiments predominantly contribute to social learning rather than direct policy changes, requiring specific strategies to upscale the knowledge generated. We conclude the paper with a research agenda that stresses the need for more cumulative and comparative (post)assessments of climate adaptation experiments. This is important given the potential of policy experiments as governing approaches in the advancement of climate adaptation.

This article explores the logics mobilized by stakeholders involved in national climate governance to identify ways of conciliating them for sound governance. Based on the theoretical framework of institutional logics, the study offers an innovative perspective on climate governance and the management of green funds. Content analysis of the briefs submitted (N = 46) to a public hearing in Quebec (Canada) reveals three competing institutional logics: scientific governance, authority-based governance, and participative governance. The results of this research have significant managerial and political implications for our understanding of the interactions between the different logics and for identifying ways to optimize climate governance. It also addresses essential but under-researched aspects of national climate governance and green fund management.

Growing awareness and concern over environmental issues has been accompanied by a proliferation of international environmental agreements during the last half-century. Among these, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), stands out as one of the oldest and strongest influences on global biodiversity conservation policy. However, the effectiveness of CITES has been questioned—for various reasons and from various quarters—with a range of differing opinions. To provide further insight on this issue we drew from and built upon recent advances in the environmental governance literature to develop an approach to analysing how the CITES-centred wildlife trading regime influences actor behaviour. After developing a rule-categorised framework to analyse the structure of the treaty, we conducted dynamic analysis of actor behaviour using case study material on CITES-listed African megafauna species (elephants, rhinoceroses, and lions), examining recent developments over a five-year period (2016–2020). Drawing on this material, we further applied institutional diagnostics to gain insight into the conservation effectiveness of the CITES regime. Our analysis of these case studies suggests that CITES can be gamed by special interest groups and that its institutional design facilitates the evolution of an international prohibition regime. Our research produces novel insights into the operation of this process and raises concerns about consequences for African biodiversity conservation. We conclude with recommendations for wildlife trade policy reform and further research.

Although considerable research over the past two decades has examined collective learning in environmental governance, much of this scholarship has focused on cases where learning occurred, limiting our understanding of the drivers and barriers to learning. To advance knowledge of what we call the “collective learning continuum,” we compare cases of learning to cases where learning was not found to occur or its effects were “blocked.” Through semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in science-policy forums in the Colorado River Basin, a large and complex river basin in western North America, we examine differences and patterns that explain moments of learning, blocked learning, or non-learning, drawing insights from the collective learning framework. Our results find various factors that influence learning, blocked learning, and non-learning. We discover technical and social factors as common drivers of both learning and blocked learning. In contrast, we find more structural factors associated with non-learning. At the same time, the cases reveal insights about the role of political factors, such as timing, legal constraints, and priorities, which are underdeveloped in the collective learning framework. Overall, these findings advance theoretical knowledge of the collective learning continuum and offer practical insights that may strengthen the coordination of science and management for effective governance within the Basin.

Residential energy efficiency improvements are generally considered integral to achieving climate change targets. Alongside the primary benefits of reducing energy use and consumer bills, there is increasing policy interest in the potential for energy efficiency programmes to deliver economy-wide gains, measured by gross domestic product, employment, household real incomes and spending power etc. Our previous research shows that such sustained gains are likely over time. Here, we consider how transitory outcomes are likely to be heavily influenced by the timing of actions and who pays, how and when. Insight in this regard is crucial for policy makers considering the mix and timing of measures to reach net zero outcomes that are economically as well as technically feasible. We consider alternative funding, distributions and timeframes for residential retrofitting costs and projects using a UK economy-wide scenario simulation model. The key insight is that while government support for the provision of low-cost finance options is strategically important in alleviating budget constraints and mitigating potential short-term negative impacts on household spending, producer responses to the wind down of retrofitting spending can disrupt the adjustment of the economy. Here we identify pros and cons of different trajectories of action towards high-level energy efficiency policy targets.

The effectiveness and efficiency of environmental policy largely depends on how other policies take account of ecological objectives, whether in the industrial, agricultural, urban planning, transport, housing or budget sectors. The state bears responsibility for how these public policies interrelate, including establishing a hierarchy of priority or allowing one area to ignore another. What can we learn about environmental policy from an analysis of the tensions between multiple sectoral policies, and more generally about the state and the political and institutional functioning that shapes the management of an environmental issue? Taking water management in France as a case study, this article argues that an approach focused on the regulation of tensions between various public policies can shed new light on the structural difficulties of environmental policy. It shows how ideas, norms, interests, strategies, professional cultures, and so forth, that underpin public policy outside the environmental field shape the handling of ecological issues. It also highlights the way the state views and handles these tensions between policies through institutional arrangements and socio-political compromises with influential sectoral actors and social groups.

The global uptake of renewable technology is both a dramatic and insufficient contribution to achieving a 1.5–2° world. However, urgently decarbonizing energy use and systems by shifting to renewables relies on intensifying global supply chains, beginning with the extraction of “critical” minerals, an industry that has a long history of generating significant social and ecological harms. This paper examines the nature of transnational governance initiatives that have emerged to regulate what has been called “renewables extractivism.” We develop a novel database of 44 transnational initiatives for governing minerals for onshore wind, solar PV, and lithium-ion batteries, which are driving renewable energy uptake. The database reveals “governance gaps” that refer to an absence of rules for many critical minerals and “accountability traps” where actors are held responsible for processes, standards, and sanctions that reflect their own normative logics, rather than the needs of affected communities and ecosystems. Current initiatives are designed in a way that measures, evaluates, and (very rarely) sanctions governance outcomes primarily in relation to supply chain security and energy access, as opposed to mitigating the social and environmental harms of resource extraction. The result is a transnational governance architecture that operates primarily (and systematically) with minimal scrutiny, transparency, and accountability. For stakeholders directly affected by the latest mining boom cycle, the absence of effective and legitimate accountability mechanisms reinforces a pattern of uneven development that shifts the most destructive forms of extraction to the social and ecological margins of the global commodity frontier.