Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

Exploring how actors translate public policy content into practice provides new insight into policy processes. Because they are driven by contextual circumstances and values, that is, they are socially constructed, studying the interpretations and negotiations involved in the translation process advances our understanding of what shapes implementation agents, and subsequently the success of policy implementation. The Swedish moose policy, a legislative framework for decentralizing moose management in order to balance the various interests affected by the presence and abundance of moose, was used as a case study. In response to the task of implementation, some of the key stakeholders sought their own strategies for successful implementation and to achieve the national policy goals. This response expressed itself as two separate agreements, in 2016 and 2019, between different constellations of implementing actors (landowner and hunter organizations). These agreements provide an example of how key actors can translate policy, and expose inadequate policy designs. Revealing how the implementing actors perceive the policy and each other helps explain the continued presence of social and political conflict. Our results indicate that power struggles underpin the translation process; by constructing the core problem differently, not sharing ideas about management and using language that discourages collaboration, the actors' translations, together with a lack of clarity in policy design, hinder the chances of successful policy implementation. Policy processes have become increasingly complex, and differences between implementers present as obstacles that have to be overcome. The paper contributes to our understanding of implementation processes within a collaborative governance setting, where the responsibility of the implementation process has been devolved to non-state actors.

Biodiversity offsetting is a governance mechanism proposed as a solution to ecosystem degradation and the underlying economic drivers. Biodiversity offsetting's potential is often evaluated and argued with ecological and economic criteria. These factors are intertwined with a multitude of social and ideological conditions for acceptance and legitimacy, which have received less systematic empirical attention especially from the perspective of the actors who implement the offsets. In this paper, we empirically analyse how companies and authorities, the central actors applying biodiversity offsetting in practice, perceive the social acceptance in the design and implementation of the emerging mechanism in Finland. The interview data analysed with three interlinked dimensions of social acceptance, namely socio-political acceptance, market acceptance and community acceptance reveal where the mechanism's implementation may face friction with the central actors. While the importance of social acceptance of biodiversity offsetting shows to be a priority for the actors that will be implementing the mechanism and carrying the responsibility of the offsets in practice, the division of roles and benefits remains a point of tension, in the political sphere, in the market and in the community. Our analysis points to the necessity of integrating social and local values alongside ecological and economic ones as a way to address social acceptance. Finding the limits to flexibility between ecological, economic and social aspects is important in order to reach the diverse objectives of a BO mechanism.

In 2009, the City of Copenhagen declared its objective to become the first CO₂-neutral city in the world by 2025 by practicing a collaborative climate governance approach. However, a 2020 status reported a further need for decarbonisation of at least 33% to reach this target. By applying a synthesised polycentric concept—supplemented by participatory climate governance studies—we analyse the deficient results of collaborative climate governance in Copenhagen 2006–2020. The empirical analysis reveals an altered political prioritisation of climate issues in 2010 and, as a crucial aspect of that, an inadequate mobilisation of civic society actors and waning departmental collaboration. We conclude that, since 2010, Copenhagen has mainly applied a rather monocentric governance approach and relied on technological innovation instead of behavioural change via civic society mobilisation, which does not promote sufficient carbon mitigation processes to reach carbon neutrality in 2025. Finally, we discuss what the synthesised polycentric concept adds to the debate about bold urban climate governance and how it could be further developed. Empirically, we draw on document analysis and interviews with 32 key actors in Copenhagen.

The global economy is producing unequal economic exchanges between countries, including illegitimate transfer of wealth from low-income countries, which ultimately undermine efforts towards securing robust social welfare systems. This puts policies on trade and finance, corporate governance and circular economy at the centre of the global development puzzle. Policy coherence for development must be understood in the context of the tension between the overarching societal goal of achieving sustainability and the functioning of the global economy. In this article, we focus on the political and legal challenges this puzzle presents, using the case of European Union policies on business, finance and circular economy, which have global impacts. We see these as core areas of law and policy where advances are made but which need to be better positioned within an overarching aim of sustainability.

Policy integration required for delivering multi-functional blue-green infrastructure (BGI) is difficult to achieve, because environmental policymaking is characterised by sectoral responsibilities and institutional structures that hinder collaboration. Both theory and practice consider urban living labs (ULLs) as promising vehicles for policy integration, as ULLs can overcome institutional structures. This article presents a framework that assesses how the urban living lab can contribute to policy integration in BGI projects and applies this to three case studies in Antwerp (Belgium), Dordrecht (the Netherlands), and Gothenburg (Sweden). Our findings demonstrate that ULLs can enhance policy integration through defining integrative aims, creating shared accountability structures, and assigning a clear problem owner with authority. ULLs can equally hinder policy integration because their dependence on sectoral funding results in narrowed-down goals. Moreover, their experimental, non-committal position gives them limited power to pull down institutional structures. Thus, ULLs do not automatically enhance policy integration in BGI projects.

In this paper, we explore how social innovation can provide a range of ecosystem services to local people while supporting public policies and private sector initiatives in delivering successful and innovative food distribution channels. In the Mediterranean basin, the status of commercial fish stocks is critical. In this sense, small-scale, low-impact fishing is a way to sustainably utilise socially innovative practices in the use of natural assets and to provide support to rural livelihoods while having minimal impacts on the marine environment. We use an innovative evaluation method, based on the integration of qualitative information with quantitative indicators, to assess social innovation initiatives and their impacts. The use of the methodology is demonstrated on the example of the project A Box of Sea, Greece. The results obtained show that this social initiative provides a novel food consumption and distribution model aiming at making low impact fishing more economically viable, and therefore achieving a triple sustainability for the sector (environmental, social, and economic). We identify third sector social innovation schemes as key tools to develop novel distribution systems supporting local communities (providing employment, fostering new networks and collaborations across fishers), while improving governance practices of the current fishing sector by creating a fairer market that protects the marine environment. Our findings provide a foundation upon which future evaluations of similar projects can build and compare. Such comparisons are crucial in determining patterns related to the innovation transfer processes.

Halieutic resources and small-scale fisheries are globally under stress due to global changes. This phenomenon has very strong impacts on the socioeconomic situation of vast coastal areas worldwide and of the communities living there, whose economies rely on the ocean. In the current context of a decrease of several halieutic stocks, there is a need of understanding what could be the avenues for fisheries-dependent communities to adapt to global changes whilst preserving both local biodiversity and their ability to develop themselves. In this paper, we explore how a cooperative fisheries organizational model could allow coastal communities to foster their development without increasing the pressure on the resource they harvest. Through the analysis of the example of northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) indigenous fisheries in eastern Québec, we expose how a cooperative-based organization of fisheries that is oriented towards community development can foster resilience against the current decline of the resource in a socially vulnerable context at a micro and macro level. Furthermore, we show how collaboration between diverse types of fisheries organizations can allow socially innovative practices to scale up.

As European mountain forests are a significant world carbon stock and sequester, they have a prominent position in climate policies and climate smart forestry (CSF) implementation. However, forest ecosystem services (ES) that are public or common goods (i.e., of carbon sequestration) face a traditional social dilemma of individual versus collective interests, which often generate conflicts, and result in the overuse of ES and resource depletion. In this article, we elaborate a conceptual analytical framework and use it in case studies selected in European mountain areas to analyse the potential of socio-ecological systems to develop CSF. Collective self-organized forestry regimes, as a form of social innovation, are the main focus, compared with centrally governed state regimes and forest management practices in municipal forests. A conceptual framework to analyse collective self-organized regimes and compare these with other CSF-applicable forestry regimes is elaborated using a mixed-method approach, centered around the estimation of carbon sequestration potential. The results indicate that collective self-organized forestry regimes can play a role in fostering the transition of European forestry towards CSF.

A confluence of concerns about tropical forest loss, global warming, and social inequality drive calls to transform land use governance. Yet there is widespread debate about what must be transformed, by whom, and how. The increasing equation of transformation with ambitious, quantitative global targets, such as “net zero emissions” or “zero deforestation” has gained widespread appeal as a means to inspire action and hold powerful actors to account. However presenting targets themselves as the end goals of transformation, obscures both the means of achieving them and the social and environmental values that legitimate them. The escalation of targets for land use, in particular, is disconnected from targeted geographies, lacks accountability to socially diverse knowledge and priorities, and is readily appropriated by powerful actors at multiple scales. This paper argues instead, for an equity-based approach to transformation that reveals how unequal power distorts both the ends and the means of global governance. We illustrate this argument with five case-study “vignettes” in Indonesia, Ghana, Peru, and Brazil that reveal how de-contextualized, target-based thinking has reinforced state and corporate control over resources at the expense of local access, while largely failing to deliver the promised environmental outcomes. We conclude that equity-focused, case study research is critical not only to unpack the local consequences of pursuing global targets, but also to make visible alternative efforts to achieve deeper socio-environmental transformations.

Mitigating climate change, preventing mass species extinctions, improving rural livelihoods, and disaster risk reduction are among today's most urgent challenges. To meet these challenges, a large number of social actors need to agree to engage and act collectively on Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR), ensuring its dual goal of restoring ecological functionality and improving people's wellbeing. Although FLR has gained momentum globally, the experiences so far continue to face socio-economic and governance challenges associated with the design and realization of effective efforts. Social Innovation (SI) can be seen contemporarily as the process and the result of interaction between stakeholders in the construction of solutions to social needs and problems, including those tackled by FLR. Here, using a content analysis approach applied to existing literature, we propose five possible conceptual bridges between FLR and SI. The Social Innovative – Forest and Landscape Restoration (SI-FLR) process advocates that sustainable livelihood needs should be attended first to ensure the Social-Ecological Systems' resilience. These bridges are: (1) “Landscape as the main context”; (2) “Nature as social need”; (3) “Landscape stewardship groups”; (4) “Governance capabilities”; (5) “Adapting and transforming to enhance resilience.” Identifying these bridges, will help decision-makers and project managers to improve the FLR initiatives by supporting the potential of SI and sparking the interest of other researchers to explore the many possibilities of SI-FLR.