Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

Over the past decade, The People's Republic of China has increased its influence in global climate governance. Despite the strong interest in policy frames related to climate change at the global level, few studies have explored policy frames within China. This paper therefore adopts a frame analysis to study the evolution in framing of domestic climate policies in China over the period 2009–24. Our research finds that diagnostic frames (the “problem”) identify development pressure, energy sector, and the impacts of natural disasters, pollution and ecosystem damage/change as key issues to be addressed. Prognostic frames (the “solutions”) encompass energy system decarbonization, industry reform, nature-based solutions, market-oriented solutions, and international cooperation. The motivational framings (the “ideational motivations”), include green development, ecological civilization, the principle of Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR), and multilateralism. The study reveals shifts in diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames of the national government across three periods.

Transformations of existing systemic structures are needed to address the root cause of many environmental land-use (ELU) problems: unsustainable land use. One policy principle that can help achieve such transformation entails integrating cross-cutting ELU problems with non-environmental policy domains, also known as environmental policy integration (EPI). Its transformative potential is disputed, however, because different forms of integration involve varying degrees of value attribution to environmental concerns vis-à-vis other policy goals. Since the EPI literature indicates this degree is greatly influenced by actors and institutions, we consider environmental governance integration (EGI) a more appropriate term for evaluations. Using the case of subsidence in the Dutch peatlands, we aim to provide insights into EGI's potential and scope for improvement in facilitating transformative change toward sustainable land use. Our study reveals generally low to moderate EGI, because ELU concerns were integrated within the boundaries of a land-use system that prioritizes prevailing economic interests. This indicates EGI being a (business-as-usual) governance approach that merits the label economic governance integration, since (transformative) environmental governance integration would entail an exploration of a myriad of different sustainable land-use options, irrespective of existing system structures. We recommend a cognitive shift as a precondition for institutional reform and politics favoring transformative governance.

Multilateral environmental governance regimes like the Antarctic Treaty System are pivotal in addressing today's wicked transboundary socio-ecological problems and central to their success is the facilitation of constructive knowledge exchange (KE) between research and policymaking communities. Consequently, the literature is now ripe with studies that aim to uncover the elements that enable or hinder KE successes across diverse environmental governance settings. Yet, in the Antarctic context, the KE practices that comprise Antarctic science-policy interfaces remain empirically under examined. Here we contribute by exploring the perspectives of 31 Antarctic practitioners to develop our understandings of successful KE practices in the policy contexts of the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings and the Committee for Environmental Protection. By adopting a reflexive thematic analysis, we identify 11 enablers and 9 barriers to KE success that are overlapping, interconnected and complex. According to practitioners, in the face of pervasive barriers, such as the often overshadowing effect of politics, a deficiency of KE incentives and large-scale wicked policy problems, certain Antarctic institutions and practitioners portray strong boundary spanning expertise, which despite the many challenges identified, serves to facilitate KE in support of evidence-informed decision-making. However, the extent to which boundary spanners are influential in their leadership varies, and while acknowledging that influential leadership is an important enabler for success, we raise several questions regarding the potentially unexplored assumptions that underpin current KE practices. As Antarctic practitioners share a desire to foster inclusive, iterative and multidirectional science-policy dialogues among other identified improvements, we suggest that harnessing reflexivity and humility within these processes will be critically important for ensuring that existing asymmetries or inequities are not reinforced under the guise of improved ways of working.

Governments have numerous avenues available to them to leverage energy consumption reductions. Low-cost policy options may be as simple as incorporating information related to energy consumption reduction. Despite the viability of these low-cost options, there is little understanding of how individual characteristics influence the viability of messaging strategies. This study fills the research gap by investigating how residents' political affiliation may affect their response to utility messaging for reducing energy consumption. We use the City of Tallahassee, Florida, as a testbed to investigate how informational messages alter customers' energy consumption behavior. We examined the effects of monthly messages on a random sample of 3000 households from 2011 to 2015. Our analysis reveals that pro-environmental and cost savings frames result in different levels of energy conservation according to political affiliation. This study helps resolve previous studies' inconsistent findings by expanding the information analysis to fine-scale data observed in actual energy consumption behavior. For practitioners, our results shed new light on how to effectively alter customers' energy conservation behavior through messaging by strategically accounting for the characteristics of customers.

Climate change requires locally tailored solutions that consider diverse environmental and cultural contexts. This study situates climate action within Sweden's forest landscapes, exploring how local forest stakeholders prioritize and motivate climate action targets for immediate implementation. By engaging in knowledge co-production processes in local communities, we sought to develop place-based climate action pathways, rooted in stakeholders' visions for their communities' futures. We identified three main climate action pathways: forest-based bioeconomy, localism, and global systemic change. These pathways varied in policy targets, governance directions, focus of change, and preferred economic systems. We found that while the pathways generally aligned with the underlying assumptions of overarching scenario archetypes, their ideological differences regarding governance and policy levels and directions were less distinct. Moreover, despite differing foci and perspectives, forest management strategies were similar in all pathways. The ideological dimensions of the climate action pathways became less visible when considering the management of forests. Our findings underscore the embeddedness of local climate action within broader environmental, social, and political structures, and the challenges of linking local landscape understandings to global environmental processes. While practical, locally specific solutions can transcend ideological debates, they may also obscure necessary ideological and political considerations for effective land use and management strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Soft regulations refer to a wide range of quasi-legal instruments enforced through non-binding and less coercive mechanisms. They are becoming increasingly vital in environmental governance for addressing complex issues across multilevel government authorities. However, the impact of sub-national state soft regulations on local governments has not received adequate scholarly attention. In this study, we compile a novel dataset of U.S. local government climate mitigation actions and state-level climate policies from various sources. We test how state climate action plans—primary examples of soft regulation—along with four other state-level hard regulations, influence local governments' climate mitigation actions. Our findings reveal that, while state climate action plans do not directly drive local governments' specific climate mitigation actions, they play significant roles in motivating local goal setting. In contrast, hard regulations, such as state policies that directly target CO₂ emissions, not only stimulate local goal setting on climate change but also promote direct climate mitigation actions. Moreover, our results demonstrate the interactive effect of soft and hard regulations in fostering intergovernmental collaboration on climate change.

In this paper, we examine the role of trust in the international climate negotiations. We (1) identify forms of trust inferred from institutional designs, (2) analyse effects of institutional design on social and political trust and (3) describe the relationship between social and political trust in international climate change negotiations. We do this by combining document analysis, literature review and interviews. We find that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement imply different forms of trust and thereby produce different levels of trust. Social trust is generally medium to high, political trust rather low. Our analysis illustrates tensions and contradictions between human agency and intention, on the one hand, and political agency and process, on the other. These tensions and contradictions are such that, although delegates at the international climate conferences do at least partly trust each other, they meet in an institutional context that is marked by lack of political trust. Moving forward, we discuss whether this lack of trust is well-founded or not given the current institutional and organisational structures of the UNFCCC and its subsequent agreements and what it is highlighting in terms of specific flaws or omissions in the UNFCCC's design.

Across the globe, ecosystems, biodiversity and human societies are experiencing the escalating and often catastrophic impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Well-considered, properly resourced and trans-scalar adaptation responses are essential. Local governments (e.g., municipal councils) can provide crucial support to communities enabling planning, response and recovery from climate change impacts. While innumerable municipal climate change adaptation policies, strategies and plans have been developed, the implementation of adaptation actions typically lags, creating a planning-to-implementation gap. Contributing factors and the opportunities to overcome key constraints remain underexplored. This article reports the results of research addressing that knowledge gap analysing the circumstances that give rise to a municipal climate adaptation implementation gap, and the opportunities to progress from adaptation planning to implementation. Interviews with 25 local government leaders and staff reveal five key opportunities to advance the implementation of adaptation polices and plans—(i) mobilising novel finance solutions; (ii) developing an adaptation skills pipeline; (iii) building collaborative and trans-disciplinary ways of working across municipal councils; (iv) enhancing the salience and prominence of adaptation as a core municipal concern and (v) legislating for municipal climate change adaptation mainstreaming. Establishing good climate governance and improving capacity for adaptation will be critical if local governments are to close the municipal climate change adaptation planning-to-implementation gap.

The threat of service failures because of climate shocks can provoke a re-negotiation of roles and responsibilities among private and public actors, and a shift towards more polycentric arrangements. This research builds on frameworks for documenting the emergence and evolution of polycentric governance arrangements through an analysis of the enrollment of private corporate actors in water provisioning services in response to the “Day Zero” 2017–2018 drought in Cape Town, South Africa. Through an analysis of interview data, we document the motivations of the corporate and municipal actors to coordinate their efforts to address acute water shortages through a novel governance venue and mechanism: Water Service Intermediaries. We document their experience with collaboration in the governance arrangements that evolved. The case illustrates both the potential, but also the limitations of shifts toward polycentricity in the context of critical resource provisioning. Our actor-centric approach documents the transaction and material costs associated with new regulatory burdens as the actors negotiated their respective responsibilities and roles. Actors face coordination challenges associated with their dependence on shared physical infrastructure, tensions associated with duties of care towards specific constituencies, and the friction entailed in reconciling their new nodal responsibilities and core missions. While the experiment in this form of polycentric water provisioning was curtailed at the end of the drought, the evidence of feedback and learning among private and public actors indicates a shift in mindsets concerning joint responsibilities for urban resilience, and the potential for future collaboration in polycentric governance around novel issues.

Interest in knowledge politics driving urban environmental policy is growing. The aim of this paper is to assess the conditions that enable an epistemic community of experts to influence policy in a specific locality. We evaluate an epistemic community of urban climatology researchers in Fukuoka, Japan, who have successfully engaged with local policy despite documented knowledge circulation failures for urban climatology elsewhere. The research is based on a process tracing-derived methodology, analysing archival and documentary sources. Its results show the epistemic community has conducted observational and modelling-based research in Fukuoka over decades, networking with peers across Japan and globally and making recommendations for policy interventions locally through government expert committees and collaborative projects. These findings reflect the importance of professionalisation and modes of persuasion – especially visuals, such as maps showing heat islands – in explaining how epistemic communities come to be effective. We argue, however, that institutions constitute epistemic communities as well as individuals. The conclusions display, however, that even if an epistemic community is effective in influencing policy, this will not necessarily translate into practical interventions in the built environment. Understanding how epistemic communities define and measure their own ‘success’ is thus an area for future research.