Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

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.

The circular economy (CE) was adopted in 2015 by the European Union (EU). Since its emergence, the CE has proved to be a remarkably powerful idea that has shifted the understanding of the economy, and consequently, it has shaped the EU's economic and environmental policies. The public policy literature theorises such shifts in collective understanding through the concept of policy learning, a process through which ideas are understood and adopted. Yet this literature lacks clarity on the factors that can explain policy learning within a policy community. We use the case of the EU's adoption of the CE to address this gap, exploring the factors that account for the EU's adoption of the CE from the policy-learning perspective. We show how actors in the policy community have constructed, championed, supported and pioneered the CE and argue that these four factors have mutually reinforced each other, leading to policy learning and the wide acceptance of this idea within EU policy-making. Revealing these factors helps advance policy learning theory and contributes to the CE literature and environmental policy and governance literature more generally by furthering our understanding of how and why certain policy ideas are adopted.

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that environmental governance in China is a typical example of authoritarian environmentalism. By analyzing the case of energy governance, it indicates that China has become aware that energy and environmental issues are inter-related and complicated and that more diverse and multi-level solutions are required to reach increasingly ambitious national goals. In the context of ongoing state reform, local governments, enterprises, and civil society have played more active roles during the process of policy formulation and implementation. But meanwhile, the central government is tightening regulation and supervision to reduce non-compliance with its energy initiatives and to safeguard national security and social stability. Therefore, energy governance in China has displayed a mixture of democratic and authoritarian elements. The state can adopt different measures based on the specific situation it faces and the final outcome it wants to reach. More broadly, this case reveals that there is no simple relationship between the regime type and its corresponding energy governance model. The study of environmental politics should not be confined to the examination of formal institutional features but also needs to take concrete practices in every country into account.

Local authorities are important actors in sustainability transformations, but smaller municipalities generally do not have the same capacities as larger ones to work strategically with climate-related risks and long-term sustainability issues. Our study analyses the efforts of two Swedish local authorities to build capacity for transformative climate governance, paying attention to how structural factors and multi-level governance relations shape local capacity building. Drawing on interviews with municipal staff and the analysis of policy documents we show that both local authorities are increasingly applying experimental climate governance approaches. In Enköping, innovative governance processes support sustainability objectives and promote public–private collaboration. In Kiruna, the necessity to move the town centre has advanced innovation capacity but steals attention from other issues. We conclude that vertical and horizontal multi-level governance relations facilitate capacity building, but in a national context where climate action is largely voluntary, more support is needed for smaller municipalities with limited resources to reach their climate goals.

Confronted by intersecting ecological and social crises associated with the rise of the Anthropocene, architects of global environmental governance have often attempted to harness accountability claims to single out the individual or organisational actors contributing most significantly to these crises and pressure them to uphold responsibilities to society and the planet. Yet critics have cautioned against excessive reliance on individualised accountabilities as means of tackling planetary crises, given the constrained ability of such approaches to lead the large-scale transformations required to redirect anthropogenic drivers of global environmental change. This article adapts agent-centered approaches to accountability to address such critiques. It is first argued that agent-centered accountability is an important element in broader efforts to support systemic change, helping to identify responsible powerholders, redefine normative standards of responsibility and empower advocates of strengthened global environmental governance to demand compliance with expanded responsibilities. However to take seriously the distinctive demands of large-scale institutional change, such approaches need to be: (a) differentiated in ways that account for the contrasting roles of different individual and organisational actors within de-centred accountability systems; (b) materially extended in ways that enable agents to be held more effectively to account for their contributions to collective social and political processes; and (c) discursively challenged in ways that resist discursive efforts to present individualised accountabilities as substitutes for more radical and large-scale institutional interventions. The article's argument is elaborated and illustrated through exploration of problems and practices of accountability associated with the contested governance of global production systems.

To accelerate the clean energy transition, it is necessary to better understand the global policy dynamics and motivations behind clean energy policy adoptions and diffusion. This article examines the differential roles of internal and external diffusion factors on decisions to adopt renewable energy policies, that is, Feed-In Tariffs (FIT) and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), employing a unique blend of cluster analysis and event history analysis. Cluster analysis uncovers a dichotomy in adopting countries. First, early adopters emerge as high-income, democratic countries, mostly energy importers with high CO₂ emissions, with OECD and EU membership. Conversely, the second cluster consists of adopters from middle-income, non-OECD, and non-EU nations with lower CO₂ emissions. Strikingly, these clusters align with UNFCCC party classifications, underscoring the pivotal role of international agreements. Event history analysis suggests that especially environmental pressure, but also democratic governance and economic development are important when adopting renewable energy policies. Interestingly, environmental endowments seem to be less important. These findings lead to an important question: Are the requisite policy tools readily available to navigate diverse socio-economic, political, and environmental landscapes, and are they deployed in a timely fashion? Beyond these findings, the study also shows that policy diffusion especially through normative emulation and social learning—operationalized as political globalization, OECD member and following regional neighbors—are important for policy adoption, suggesting the importance of such tools for promoting policies. Moreover, distinctive factors come into play when examining the adoption of FIT versus RPS policies, emphasizing the need for nuanced policy approaches.

The global environmental crisis is the result of a complex web of causation and distributed agency, where not even the most powerful individual actors can be considered responsible nor remedy the situation alone. This has prompted multiple calls across societies for transformative social change. What role can accountability play in this context? Starting in the theoretical traditions of microsociology and pragmatic sociology, this article elaborates the role of accountability in social interactions. To provide an account that justifies an action or inaction is here understood as a process of social ordering, where accounts are assessed as acceptable only after they have been tested against higher normative principles. Microsocial practices are, in this way, linked to macrosocial order. The following section turns to the global environmental crisis, showing that the crisis raises normative as well as epistemic challenges. The complexity of the socio-environmental situation makes it hard to know what should be done and opens normative orders and epistemic claims to contestation. This situation provides increased opportunities for strategic maneuvering to justify actions as well as opportunities to question social practices and social order. The article concludes by discussing the role of accountability in climate change. Accountability can serve as a mechanism to attach issues to the current environmental crisis and re-embed decisions and practice in an environmental moral order. As part of a broader palette of instruments, rules and norms, accountability has an important function to play in transforming society towards sustainability.

The arrival of the Anthropocene requires a profound rethinking of business accountability. A central challenge in this age is the possibility of pushing past planetary boundaries, which may irreversibly propel the Earth system into a new equilibrium that is less hospitable for human civilization. Businesses drive many of the processes contributing to such boundaries, and are powerful political actors who may shape or obstruct the necessary transformations to our socio-economic systems. We therefore need to reconsider their accountability, focused on the following guiding question: Who (in business) should be accountable to whom for what? The answer to this question has important implications for environmental policy and governance. Drawing on a range of recent conceptual and policy developments, I present four major lines of thinking for reconsidering business accountability in the Anthropocene context: to rethink the purpose of business; to acknowledge companies' expanded but shared accountability for productive activities; to heighten collective and individual liability for past and future actions linked to overshooting planetary boundaries; and to recognize business accountability for influencing political and societal processes. Each of these lines of thinking imply policy changes related to, inter alia, corporate governance, due diligence, liability, and lobbying laws. I further call on businesses to actively participate in the large-scale transformation necessary to keep within planetary boundaries by changing not only their production processes, but also product portfolios, business models, legal forms, and political and societal engagement; and highlight avenues for future research.