Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

Urban Living Labs are open innovation ecosystems that integrate research and innovation activities within urban communities. However, while solutions co-created and tested in the Urban Living Labs must be contextualized and tailored to each city's uniqueness, broader impact requires generalization and systematic replication across geographical, institutional, and sectoral boundaries. This article examines nine Living Labs in European coastal cities, identifying several barriers and drivers for mainstreaming and upscaling solutions to increase climate resilience through the Living Lab Integrative Process. Our analysis focuses on three main categories. First, social and cultural aspects highlighted include stakeholder engagement and awareness, communication, and dissemination. Second, we assess institutional and political aspects, such as silos, bureaucracy, and resources. Last, we investigate technical factors as knowledge and experience, technical and internal capacity, data availability and accessibility, climate-related policies and actions, and long-term perspective. The results suggest that while some barriers and drivers are common across the cases, providing generalizable patterns, there are also specific differences requiring tailored solutions at the local scale. Nonetheless, the diversity in drivers indicates the potential for sharing knowledge across cases to translate, embed, and scale solutions, enhancing the transition toward climate resilience. Learning and innovation in real-life contexts are fundamental in the Living Lab approach, and our findings demonstrate that cross-case learning can enhance an iterative process of contextualizing and generalizing innovative climate solutions.

By generating and explaining facts, science holds an important role in environmental policy decision-making. However, scientific knowledge is often framed as objective and neutral in policy debates, which can be challenged by stakeholders who have a different view of the issue. To counter this situation, we propose a novel scientific approach to analyze problems that are highly contested and seem difficult to resolve, that is, wicked problems. Our study combined post-normal science and environmental justice perspectives to shed light on a wicked problem—the largely unsuccessful efforts to rehabilitate yellow perch stocks in Lac Saint-Pierre (LSP), Quebec, Canada. The combination of these two perspectives allows us to investigate the causes of the decrease of yellow perch stocks and the social and institutional barriers to rehabilitation—which can only be overcome if the injustice perceived by different stakeholders is overcome. Our study presents an approach that addresses uncertainties, integrates various knowledge forms, reassesses decision-making procedures, and highlights inequalities within a specified territory. The research also underlines the importance of the qualitative dimension in the development of knowledge and the need to address equity in the development of environmental policies.

Justice in sustainability transitions requires states to design transition policies that ‘leave no-one behind’. Emphasising fairness, however, may entail slowing or scaling down the impetus of sustainability transition. To examine this risk empirically, we analysed how stakeholders frame justice in deliberating policy measures needed to support just transition in agricultural land use and dietary changes, the cornerstones of building healthier and climate friendlier food systems in Finland. The results show that justice frames focus on the potential impacts of transition, largely ignore global scale, and prioritise social justice claims at the cost of environmental ambition. To create just and environmentally effective policies, policymakers need to consider justice at the level of policy-mixes combining environmental and social policies. Furthermore, they need to acknowledge systemic injustices present in existing systems while striving towards just transition.

In this paper, we argue that, while it is necessary to modify existing policy using the lessons learned from disaster events (i.e., reactive learning), this approach is insufficient on its own for dealing with ongoing and emerging climate-induced disaster risks. Rather, we assert that policymakers must also adopt a proactive and anticipatory learning approach that would enable policy learning and policy evolution in the absence of a major disaster event. We examine drivers, actors, and processes of change in disaster-management policy paradigms in Bangladesh. A longitudinal learning perspective is applied. We categorize disaster management (DM) policy regimes into three learning episodes: (i) reactive, (ii) transitional, and (iii) proactive. The roles of reactive and proactive learning in shifting DM policy paradigms within these learning episodes are particularly determined. Finally, five interrelated factors that triggered proactive policymaking are identified, which are: risk-oriented policymaking; cross-scale (i.e., lesson drawing and policy transfer) and cross-level (i.e., from local, regional, and national experience) learning; participation of multiple stakeholders; research-informed and knowledge-based policymaking; and the presence of a strong advocacy group and a participatory policy process.

The environmental and health problems caused by plastics throughout their life cycle have attracted considerable public attention over the past decade, triggering policy responses in many constituencies. Similarly, interdisciplinary research on plastics has been burgeoning in the past few years, and political science contributions have covered the manifold root causes and consequences of this shift in public policy including media coverage, evolving discourses and policy agendas. In view of this policy relevance that drives scholarly inquiry, it is surprising that we lack a systematic assessment of the actual policy outputs. This article fills this lacuna by developing a policy portfolio approach to plastic regulation. To illustrate and substantiate our approach, we provide an exploratory analysis of EU plastics regulation over the last twenty years, complementing this with Denmark, Germany, and Poland as diverse cases of member state regulation. Overall, our research shows that the number of policy measures targeting plastics has massively increased both at the supranational and national level. This policy growth, however, varies across policy targets and instruments. Our findings highlight first, that the policy targets addressed are mainly located at the end of the plastics life cycle; and second, that the instrument choice is privileging the use of hierarchical forms of intervention over the use of market- or information-based instruments. We discuss these features of the policy portfolio approach in light of existing research on plastics and life-cycle-oriented policy approaches such as the Circular Economy.

Citizens' assemblies to address climate change have multiplied in recent years. Seen as a useful tool to provide solutions to the climate crisis, they have, however, struggled to impact public policy. Additionally, little is known about how citizens' proposals are diluted or rejected in climate assemblies. We explore this situation through a qualitative case study of the French Citizens' Convention on Climate. The French case is unique in that it involved the incorporation of assembly participants in the process of integrating assembly proposals into a new Law on Climate and Resilience. We use semi-structured interviews and analysis of secondary documentation to understand how citizens' views were finally excluded from draft legislation. Findings show remarkable citizen empowerment taking place during the Citizens' Convention, which nevertheless vanished during the joint elaboration of the law, allowing certain political and economic interests to impose their vision. We suggest that organisers of the process and social movements engaged in climate assemblies should be aware of such risks and try to control how decision-makers adopt citizen proposals for producing legislation in order to avoid exclusions and democracy deficits in democratic climate policy-making. We discuss and reflect on the potential and limits of deliberative and agonistic approaches to democracy and climate action.

Cities are important sites for societal transitions towards sustainability, which is increasingly recognised around the issue of biodiversity conservation and protection. However, cities are often characterised by the need to develop and grow. Furthermore, efforts to promote sustainable development have been criticised as failing to address the fundamental causes of environmental destruction. In this article, based on interviews with bureaucrats and documentary analysis, I explore urban planning and biodiversity protection at four Swedish municipalities. Biodiversity protection has been an official goal in Sweden for 30 years. As such, my research aim is to explore how Swedish bureaucrats represent efforts to balance imperatives to develop cities and protect biodiversity. Taking an institutional approach, I identify what information is included and excluded. In assessing municipal discourse, I utilise the theory of sociocultural viability, which provides an analytical typology of four worldviews. I identify that within respondents' discourse, biodiversity primarily emerges as a product of a hierarchical view of reality, as a measurable object; an indicator; a characteristic; and as a provider that is both engineerable and replaceable. This was despite numerous respondents articulating an egalitarian desire for more holistic interpretations of biodiversity in urban planning, appreciative of its inherent worth. This suggests that biodiversity has largely been integrated into extant hierarchical conceptualisations of public administration. According to cultural theory, addressing wicked policy problems effectively requires insight from several of the typology's worldviews. As such, current practice may reiterate dominant contemporary views on nature rather than innovation towards a radically different society.

This paper argues the case for participatory exploratory energy futures development to assist net zero emissions decision making on subnational scales (local and regional authorities, communities, and neighbourhoods). There are many challenges for net zero decision making on subnational scales in the United Kingdom including a lack of statutory responsibility and societal consent for the local transformation required, and no allocation of emissions reduction to meet the national net zero emissions legislated target in aggregate. Participatory exploratory energy futures can contribute to addressing these challenges and support local decision making. This is by exploring diverse possible futures and understanding the capacity for local climate change mitigation. Participatory exploratory energy futures can act too as a seeding strategy for wider debates on a preferred local future. A framework for participatory exploratory energy futures using the 2 × 2 matrix method is proposed. It is envisaged that these exercises would be complementary to other activities on subnational scales such as climate assemblies or ‘mini-publics’. Local electoral cycles and a lack of statutory responsibility can lead to there being a focus on implementing mini-public recommendations that are feasible in the near term. The participatory exploratory futures developed explore possibilities for the local energy system and how it may evolve in a holistic manner not just in the near term but the longer term. When local policy and decision making is recognised as aligning with the desired rather than undesired future, this can motivate all in the herculean efforts to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

This article explores how discourses may influence the potential for success in mitigating climate change in Swedish municipalities. We identify dominant discourses in climate change mitigation policy in three Swedish municipalities using argumentative discourse analysis, based on policy documents and interviews as empirical material. Political leadership and adequate organizational preconditions are necessary for working with climate change mitigation in municipalities, but the role of discourse is also significant. Policy discourse constructs preconditions for certain scenarios while rendering others less likely. Previous studies have shown that the ecological modernization (EM) discourse tends to be dominant, something which this study confirms and investigates further. We find that the dominant discourse is strong EM, which largely considers it possible to decouple economic growth and environmental problems through renewable energy and technology. A focus on collaboration between stakeholders is central and a global climate justice perspective is present to some extent. Potential solutions that are not related to the market or technological innovation risk being rendered invisible when this discourse is dominant, but the inclusion of a diversity of actors and an increased focus on climate justice could potentially minimize this risk. Finally, emerging discourses around transformation and circular economy have potential to enable the forging of new paths. This depends, however, on how these concepts are framed and how they are used.