Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

This article focuses on the policy implementation barriers that result in poor adaptation and enhanced risk of exposure to extreme vulnerabilities, based on experiences in Pakistan. A number of policy implementation barriers are identified including: (i) Whether policy development is seen as a closed or open consultation process, (ii) Whether policy is seen as a generic document or an instrument for specific actions, and (iii) Whether policy administration is seen as a central or devolved process. As a case study, Pakistan's national climate change policy was considered. Pakistan is the eighth most climate change impacted country in the world. The results conclude that a prevalent top-down frame of management, centred-around federalism, has created vacuums for misinterpretation, poor understanding amongst policy implementers and false expectations of policy goals. A critical aspect of this disconnect is the lack of inclusivity of critical stakeholder groups in the policy design and development stages thus creating various barriers resulting in mistrust between different governing entities and vice versa. The study also highlights the nature of this problem and recommends a closer examination of the prerequisites of engagement in climate decision-making for better understanding and implementation of adaptation practices in de-centralised governance.

This article assesses how adaptation governance within the eThekwini (Durban) metropolitan municipality, KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa, addresses the vulnerability and adaptation of black African women to flood impacts within the municipality. The article argues that there is an intersectional lens through which black local women's experiences of vulnerability to the impact of climate change disasters need to be understood and addressed. Qualitative research methodologies were employed to collect data through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with local black African women from four areas in Durban who have experienced frequent floods over the past years. Personnel from eThekwini municipality's Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department and Disaster Management Department were also interviewed. The feminist political ecology perspective was used to unpack the nuances in power relations that engendered black African women's vulnerability and adaptation to flood impacts within the municipality. The study's findings revealed that the overall vulnerability experiences of black African women in Durban are shaped by factors relating to the lack of an ‘intentionally gendered’ approach to adaptation governance in the municipality. Adopting an intentional approach to adaptation governance is essential to inform policies responding to local black Africans' vulnerability and adaptation experiences within the study's context.

Environmental policy integration (EPI), that is, the incorporation of environmental concerns in non-environmental policy areas, has been widely adopted in public policies. However, EPI research has found much discrepancy between environmental objectives and actual implementation. This paper argues that analyzing EPI in the context of policy mixes with multiple objectives, multiple instruments and their calibrations helps to better understand unavoidable tensions and limitations. We develop a framework to assess EPI at these three levels of policy output, synthesizing the EPI and policy mix literatures. We further distinguish four analytical dimensions to assess calibrations: stringency, specificity, flexibility, and temporality. A case study of the national implementation of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in Germany 2014–2022 is used to elaborate the conceptual argument. The CAP has saliently incorporated environmental objectives, while implementation, including the calibrations of most instruments within predetermined corridors, is left to member states. A systematic meta-review of 142 texts evaluating policy instruments and calibrations in the CAP 2014–2022, focusing on Germany, found that several CAP instruments link most farm income support to pro-environmental behavior. These instruments could potentially have high environmental effectiveness and efficiency. But actual policy calibrations delivered weak EPI due to low stringency and specificity, while high flexibility and temporal accommodation of farmers' needs might support EPI by increasing acceptance. Weak EPI resulted from instrument calibrations in the face of unavoidable trade-offs between competing objectives. Our results demonstrate that calibrations can significantly affect the strength of EPI adoption, and the priorities within policy mixes more generally.

It is presented and contrasted through a framing analysis how selected environmental NGOs and the German Automotive Industry Association (VDA) engaged in the national German debate on urban air quality governance during the height of the emission scandal between 2015 and mid-2019. For this, frames of communication applied to communicate organizational priorities and conceptualizations of air quality governance to the public are discussed and their potential impact on public perception of different approaches to air quality governance assessed. It is shown that the presented frames provide opposing and competing conceptualizations of air quality impacts and related governance propositions, including health, environmental, economic, and regulatory issues. They align with the interests of the communicating actor groups and are supported by selected scientific knowledge. This, it is argued, can be linked to an interest group led capturing of public debate as identified for other politically charged topics, and structurally resembles a public negotiation on urban air quality governance. Such an approach to public discourse, it is argued, can have negative impacts on public engagement and openness to embrace sustainability led governance reforms, as it can reinforce existing attitudes and create opposition to governance change.

The governance challenges embedded in climate change are daunting. Conventional logic holds that national and international action is necessary. While the United States is a major source of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions – second only to China – national action on climate change has been lacking. However, hundreds of subnational US governments and thousands of industrial facilities are actively engaged in addressing climate change. Given the potential mismatch between the global nature of the problem and the policy reach of subnational governments, we evaluate the extent to which polycentric variation in subnational climate action is associated with changes in GHG emissions. We develop a unique data set that incudes facility-level GHG emissions from major industrial sectors in the United States over 8 years and subnational climate governance action across all 50 states. This large-N data set allows us to systematically test hypothesis from polycentric governance. This type of comparative analysis can help to better understand the conditions under which polycentric governance is associated with improved climate change outcomes, that is, declining GHG emissions. Our results suggest that even when controlling for past emissions, some elements of polycentric governance are associated with decreases in GHG emissions. Future research would benefit from augmenting the large N comparative analysis presented here with mixed methods research to more fully understand the dynamic processes shaping both climate policy and GHG emissions.

Policy coherence is crucial in the 2030 Agenda's transformative ambitions and heralded as of paramount importance to ensure the successful implementation of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and climate policy targets. Despite political efforts to achieve policy coherence, apparent trade-offs and goal conflicts have emerged – even in a proclaimed ‘front-runner’ country like Sweden. This paper examines the role of ideas in proposing and legitimising policy options and achieving policy coherence in the light of the Swedish recovery debate in 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic. Ideas of a green economic recovery put forward in the public debate are examined through thematic text and frame analysis. We show that ideas of a green transition, boosted by economic recovery spending, draw on a synergistic frame in combining social, environmental, and economic policy options, carrying a potential for coherency. However, the absence of a discussion on power, as in who stands to gain what under which circumstances, coupled with an inherent understanding of a temporal hierarchy of policy priorities does not only impact the ability to design coherent policies but may have considerable impacts on the prospects of achieving sustainability transformations.

The role of cities in mobilising transformative change has gained increasing attention in global discourses on climate change and sustainability. Through the lens of urban energy transitions, this paper focuses on how this form of change within the urban energy system can be mobilised. Capacity is an emergent concept and has been adopted to identify areas for change and assess the transformative potential of cities. Connecting three dimensions of capacity: capacity for what, capacity of whom and the process of capacity building, we present a new conceptual framework to understand diverse transition pathways. To interrogate the capacity framework in practice, we explore the illustrative cases of Hamburg and Hong Kong. The paper demonstrates that capacity is connected to specific changes in political, material, institutional and other energy-related societal contexts.  Understanding the variety of dependencies and underlying challenges within urban energy systems , as well as the kinds of actor coalitions that are capable of addressing such complexity and mobilising change, enables  the development of specific socio-technical solutions for urban energy transition pathways. Our focus on local capacity to act and how such capacity can be expanded or diminished contributes to a deeper understanding of the power relations embedded in urban energy systems and the role local actors can play in enabling and hindering processes for change. Such examination of how complex trajectories for change are defined and shaped allows significant insights into plausible futures of urban development.

Of enduring interest to social scientists is better understanding institutional design. Formal institutions (e.g., treaties and regulations) convey salient governance information, including actors' required, allowed, or prohibited actions, and monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to foster institutional compliance with those actions. Yet, few studies have compared these features in international instruments. Addressing this gap, this study utilizes the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework's rule typology and the Institutional Grammar (IG) to compare the stringency and robustness of the formal monitoring and enforcement mechanisms outlined in four conservation treaties: The International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling; the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the Convention on Migratory Species, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Doing so revealed the mechanisms' theoretical ability to manage species' appropriation levels and treaty opt-outs (e.g. reservations/objections), thwart biodiversity losses, and meet their conservation objectives. Findings include (1) identification of verbs and semantic constraints that dilute legally mandated actions to recommended outcomes; (2) a divide among treaty regimes by specificity of the required/permitted/recommended actions assigned to actors; and (3) enforcement mechanisms that require member states to take punitive action against non-compliant national actors vis-a-vis regimes with minimal to no enforcement requirements. This study complements existing institutional design, international relations, and legal scholarship by illustrating the IG's and IAD's utility to describe the treaties' formal monitoring and enforcement design features. It also provides a better understanding of formal international conservation governance which may be useful to policy designers and conservation practitioners.

Despite decades of effort, biodiversity has not attracted effective political discourse, policies, or action to halt its decline. In cities in particular, biodiversity conservation is challenged by short-term approaches, separately focusing on biodiversity or community well-being rather than on their interconnection, and pervasive beliefs that urban citizenry lack the requisite ethic or skills for conservation action or biodiversity governance. We describe how a systemic co-inquiry in Victoria Australia, conducted by citizen and agency practitioners alongside policy developers and academic researchers, modified understandings, practices, and institutional arrangements (governance) for urban biodiversity conservation. The most impactful outcomes of the early co-inquiry period were (1) start-up funding for a network to forge collaborations between community and local government actors that engage urban residents in supporting indigenous biodiversity in their gardens, and (2) empowered co-inquiry members driving the network's development. These efforts have led to on-going social learning and long-term institutional arrangements for a burgeoning network of municipally based nature stewardship collaborations that are nurturing local human–nature relations. Key challenges include(d): maintaining the co-inquiry, paradigms that undervalue urban biodiversity and the role of citizens, organizational inertia, and evaluation measures incommensurate with strengthening person-nature relationships. Our research shows how systemic co-inquiry involving citizen practitioners can surface misleading assumptions around biodiversity stewardship and governance, and help to empower citizen and agency actors to focus on nurturing sustainable human-nature relations in cities.

China has pledged to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and to become carbon neutral by 2060. Achieving the targets would need great improvement of its emissions trading scheme (ETS) that covers half of the country's emissions. Lessons from the European Union have shown that the ETS is not only a product of the changing circumstances, but its implementation and revisions are also continuously affected by the evolving context. Using a political economy perspective, we examine whether the changing environment is also affecting China's ETS. Our analysis centres on two recent contextual dynamics with relevance to the ETS: (1) the change in the ETS authority in 2018; and (2) the impacts of the deteriorating economic environment on the climate-energy policy complex. We find that China's ETS and its broad climate ambitions are still constrained by the tensions between the long-term socio-economic benefits of low-carbon policies and the short-term economic interests behind the government's policy motives, which led to conflicting interests and priorities among regulatory agencies and local governments. The analysis contributes to the political economy debates on emissions trading and China's environmental governance. It also provides practical insights to the policymakers with an in-depth inquiry into the structural barriers to China's net-zero targets.