Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

Cyrus, P. (2023). Communication and urban air quality governance in Germany: Discursive framing by selected national environmental NGOs and the Automotive Industry Association (VDA) and its potential impacts. Environmental Policy and Governance, 33(5), 561–576. https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2050.

Correspondence details for this article should have been:

Philipp Cyrus, Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, London, UK.

Email: [email protected].

The management of protected areas has been recognised as a particularly complex policy field, with many interacting actors and frequent conflicts. How policies survive potential or actual conflict is a matter of policy sustainability; policy manipulation can modify the roles and perceptions of policy actors to achieve outcomes closer to the desired ones—at least, desired by the enacting coalitions. The article investigates the governance reform of protected areas in Lombardy, Italy, focusing on the dynamics of policy sustainability amidst conflict and opposition. It examines how the Lombardy Region's 2016 reform aimed to consolidate the management of protected areas under the umbrella of regional park authorities. Despite the reform's ultimate goals appeared unquestioned, it encountered significant resistance from local administrations. The analysis focused on the context features (pre-existence of local cooperation agreements, and salience of the protected area), and mechanisms (reputation, and loss aversion) in place at local level. Their combination appears able to explain the varied outcomes of the reform, ranging from failure to partial success.

In regional planning, and more specifically transport corridor development, sustainability is often overshadowed by economic ambitions and prospects. This contribution explores how the governance of corridor development processes can enhance sustainability. It presents findings from the planning process for the Gilimanuk–Denpasar–Padang Bai (GDP) Corridor in Bali, Indonesia. The analysis is guided by a theoretical framework that builds on literature on regional development, corridor development, sustainability and governance. Using process tracing, the analysis investigates the influence of five governance factors on the process of sustainable corridor development and its outcomes, notably the presence of a sustainability vision, the governance mode, the actor constellation, the available knowledge, and the institutional setting. Whereas literature on sustainable corridors suggests that governance structures and corridor management are needed, this contribution analysis how and under what conditions these structures in practice contribute to sustainable outcomes. The findings show how the original economic focus of the corridor gradually evolved into a more sustainable one, although not all potentials were realized. These illustrate that sustainable corridors require governance of interaction processes, involving a dynamic and contextualized constellation of governance factors, that co-evolves during the planning process. Despite that the GDP corridor gradually developed into a more sustainable direction, the presence of a sustainability rather than an economic focus from the onset would have increased the potentials of realizing sustainability ambitions.

Research on international bureaucracies, such as treaty secretariats, has predominantly focused on broadening our understanding of their role, function, and influence within their respective regulatory domains. However, the potential for treaty secretariats to manage situations of institutional overlap by coordinating with other agencies across policy areas has remained understudied. This article offers new empirical and theoretical insights for studying collective agency and coordination mechanisms in instances of institutional interaction within hybrid regime complexes. Specifically, it investigates how the treaty secretariats of the Rio Conventions under the United Nations employ joint interplay management as a means to improve institutional coherence within the climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification nexus. Collectively, the public agencies aim to advance knowledge and discourse, influence norm-building processes and regulation, or build capacity and support the joint implementation of policy objectives addressing the interlinked environmental problems. They do this by interacting with various actors across governance levels, including national governments, transnational initiatives, private actors, or civil society. By tracing the process linking joint activities with effects of such interactions, this qualitative case study makes a conceptual contribution by extrapolating a mechanistic theory for joint interplay management. The article demonstrates that treaty secretariats have to contend with challenges of resource allocation, diverging mandates, leadership priorities, and the degree of politicization and timing which frequently intervene stages of strategizing and executing joint activities. The results highlight that joint interplay management can be most impactful when secretariats employ orchestration practices through joint outreach and advocacy to advance coherent institutional responses to interdependent environmental problems.

Biodiversity offsetting is considered to be an innovative policy instrument to balance land use changes with conservation priorities. Although advocates have pushed to establish biodiversity offset markets for over 20 years and critics have contested the social and ecological implications of such policy innovations, in practice, offsetting schemes have been difficult to set up, replicate, and sustain over time. Observing the underperformance of biodiversity offsetting, we argue that a critical analysis is urgently needed. We identify a need to analyze offsetting in relation to other features of biodiversity governance rather than focus on the merits and flaws of offsetting as a standalone policy instrument. Using a set-theoretic model, we consider how different institutional arrangements determine if and when biodiversity offsetting produces positive environmental outcomes. We find that offsetting adds to biodiversity governance only when three thorny challenges are met—muscular enforcement of environmental regulations, rigorous impact management aligned with the mitigation hierarchy, and the existence of evidence-based and cost-effective platforms for offsetting. Short of these conditions, outcomes are either uncertain or outright harmful to biodiversity. Reflecting more broadly on the prospects of institutionalizing offsetting mechanisms for protecting biodiversity, we conclude a need to recenter attention toward the supportive role of the state in facilitating effective policy innovations.

Multistakeholder co-management is no blueprint for smooth and accepted environmental policy implementation. Parallel processes of cooperation and conflict rather shape co-managing processes, which is the focus of this article. Combining the analysis of narratives, identities, and relational structure through means of social network analysis builds the conceptual and methodological foundation for this case study to explore a perpetual conflict between actors involved in co-designing the management plans for a local Natura 2000 forest. Two opposing narratives are identified as competing over power and competency in discussions about the management plans for the Natura 2000 forest. Negative characterization frames and antagonizing with the other side fuels an “us versus them” mentality among the actors in the co-management process and over time, a culture of conflict has become institutionalized. Interactions between the actors from the case study seemingly build on a complex, iterative pattern of disputes that is barely breakable and reversible into cooperative attitudes. Surprisingly, this culture of conflict does not resonate with the relational structure between actors in the case study as descriptive social network analysis shows. This case represents an intriguing puzzle pointing to an incongruence between relational and discursive mechanisms underlying cooperation-conflict dynamics in multistakeholder co-management, which is relevant for future examinations of cooperation and conflict in social network analyses. The results are discussed in light of power dynamics and concluded with an outlook to conflict research.

This paper examines the development of urban transport political agendas in three Nordic capital cities, Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm, that strive towards urban sustainability. Utilising the Multiple Streams framework as a basis for analysis, an overview of local problems, policy solutions, and politics that have characterised transport systems and the related policy development processes over time is constructed. The attention is then drawn towards the points in time where the streams connect, and policy windows occur, to detect formative changes and their enablers towards sustainability. The data consists of 18 semi-structured expert interviews, conducted amongst municipal policymakers and planners. The results reveal several policy windows that have transformed the local transport systems towards sustainability and an increasingly people-oriented approach. The relevance of global climate change awareness, international planning trends for liveability and cycling, public pressure, individual political decisions, and establishment of modal hierarchy is evident across the case cities, while car traffic regulation is politically challenging and addressed through very different means at very different times. The findings of this paper outline diverse ways for advancing sustainability in local policy development but also detect methods for politically halting the process.

Natural flood management is emerging as a viable way to leverage ecological services to manage flooding. Stakeholders are progressively positioning natural flood management at the scale of river catchments to encourage a move beyond localised and opportunistic actions towards more strategic and cost-effective flood risk management responses. This reflects a broader turn towards nature-based solutions, acknowledgement of the climate change adaptation imperative, and recognition that natural flood management can achieve multiple socio-economic and biophysical co-benefits. A particular set of issues connected to the specific characteristics of natural flood management are influencing attempts to move towards the catchment scale. This paper identifies evidence, funding and governance as key to understanding the challenges facing natural flood management in this context, with these issues providing a focus for the identification of strategies to move towards catchment scale outcomes. A case study exploring the Irwell catchment in Northwest England provides empirical insights on these themes and identifies approaches that can support the transition towards catchment scale natural flood management. This paper calls for wider implementation of experimental approaches in this field focused on multi-faceted evaluation, blended financing and strategic intermediaries to help overcome overarching evidence, funding and governance challenges to making this transition.

In recent decades, collaboration has become a common policy instrument in public administration, both internationally and in Sweden. Inspired by scholarly literature on collaborative governance, the aim of this study is to analyze the crucial role of public administration in the design and implementation of collaborative governance. Drawing on several years of research on Swedish forest policy and governance, our work is based on extensive empirical material, including 88 semi-structured interviews, observations, written comments from open public consultations and actors, enacted policy documents, open public hearings and a survey. Our results confirm that factors related to process design strongly affect the outputs and outcomes of collaboration in public administration. We assert that public officials should meticulously design and adapt the collaborative process during its initiation and progress, according to the policy problem and actors' incentives and motivations to participate. However, despite good intentions by public officials, the overarching priorities and contextual factors governing the policy area must be set by elected decision makers at an early stage to establish democratic accountability and high levels of policy legitimacy and acceptance. A major implication for public administration is that the increasing use of collaborative governance may be highly inefficient if it is difficult for participants to draft shared objectives and provide intended outputs because of low levels of trust, and different interpretations of knowledge and norms. Finally, in contentious policy areas, such as forest policy, political priorities must sometimes be set by elected decision makers rather than through collaborative processes.

Governance of societal transformations toward sustainability is needed to address the fundamental system failures responsible for environmental problems. Possible transformation pathways range from radical shifts to more incremental change. Experimentation is seen as a form of incremental change, but its actual transformative potential is debated. The transformative potential of experimentation is especially questionable for environmental problems characterizing a “creeping crisis” because this problem type is not particularly a lever for social change. Our empirical research contributes to this debate by systemically evaluating the significance (degree of change) and sufficiency (reach of change) of experiments relating to an environmental problem characterizing a creeping crisis that appears to be predominantly governed through experimentation: land subsidence in Dutch peatlands. We found that experiments have indeed proved to be significant for local regime actors because most have tested technical innovations that kept the overall land use system intact. However, experimentation was less significant in terms of reflecting the complexity of environmental problems; that would require a more diverse set of technical, social, legal, and planning experiments from which the strategy most suitable for specific landscape contexts could be determined. We also found signs of accumulation of outcomes, but whether this eventually initiates transformative change or creates a technological lock-in can only be determined with longitudinal research. To enhance the transformative potential of experimentation, particularly as a governance approach for creeping crises, attention must be paid to actor and institutional features since they shape experiments. Hence, we conclude with design principles for transformative experimentation.