Environmental Policy and Governance最新文献

This article offers a comprehensive examination of integrating transition studies and policy studies in the context of energy transitions, highlighting the importance of participatory governance, reflexive policy frameworks, and innovation ecosystems. By combining insights from transition studies, such as niche innovations, multilevel governance, and socio-technical regime shifts, with policy studies' institutional analysis, the paper provides a holistic framework using Germany's Energiewende as a case study. It explores how participatory governance enhances legitimacy and how reflexive governance adapts to emerging challenges, sustaining long-term transitions. The Energiewende demonstrates the value of inclusive governance, where stakeholder engagement bolsters both policy legitimacy and social acceptance. This approach also shows that empowering local communities can lead to increased trust and cooperation in implementing policies. By leveraging frameworks that support innovation ecosystems, Germany has been able to integrate renewable technologies into existing infrastructures. Additionally, aligning local initiatives with national policies has proven critical in maintaining momentum in transitions. The integration of transition and policy studies reveals that leveraging multilevel frameworks is essential to accelerate sustainable technologies while ensuring equitable stakeholder participation. Further, adaptive measures in the Energiewende highlight how iterative feedback supports continuous learning and flexibility in transition pathways. This integration underscores the necessity of balancing technological innovation with social equity to ensure a just and sustainable transition. This paper argues that integrating these fields offers a better explanatory framework and practical strategies for overcoming transition obstacles. It concludes with recommendations for future research and policy development, emphasizing inclusivity, adaptability, and innovation in creating sustainable systems.

Climate backlash and policy dismantling, that is, the reversal of existing decarbonisation policies, can be observed in an increasing number of countries. Typically, policy change tends to be slow, while climate backlash can unfold quite fast. How is such rapid political change made possible? Here, we investigate the case of Sweden, where a newly elected government significantly revised and changed existing climate policies. This change was forecast to increase carbon emissions rather than reduce them and included the abolishment of existing policies. While this process, in hindsight, could thus be seen as policy dismantling, it was characterised by a highly ambiguous debate that portrayed the new climate political approach as superior and much more effective than previous governments' approaches, and there was little, if any, opposition to these changes. To understand how such radical political change was possible, we examine policy documents and political debates and identify the discursive mechanisms employed in its legitimation. Our findings suggest that the parties in government used a set of discursive mechanisms to speak to different climate political discourses—welfarism, liberalism and nationalism—simultaneously. This created an effect that we call discursive flipping, which is qualitatively different from discursive blending, and that appeased potential opposition from both the left and right. As part of this, the creation of epistemic confusion seemed particularly effective in disarming opposition. We argue that discursive mechanisms are useful conceptual tools to examine the discursive legitimation of radical policy change, here realised by rendering discourses so ambiguous that opposition became discursively difficult to uphold.

Grassroots initiatives (GIs) play a crucial role in driving sustainability transitions. They adopt different approaches to exert impact through multi-stakeholder governance platforms, such as ‘scaling up’, ‘scaling through’ and ‘amplifying’. This paper argues that understanding how GIs achieve this impact requires viewing them as political actors and recognising multi-stakeholder governance platforms as inherently political spaces. Analysing the history of two food policy councils (FPCs) as case studies, the paper develops and applies a conceptual framework that highlights the political agency and power of GIs in sustainability transitions leading to both sociotechnical and sociopolitical change. Drawing on the concept of ‘constituency’ from social movement studies, the study highlights the political power of GIs to impact sustainability transitions with democratising aims. The findings reveal that the political context—shaped by factors such as a history of collaboration, institutional proximity, and varying levels of competition between state authorities at distinct administrative levels —profoundly influences how FPCs function as political spaces and the approaches enacted by GIs to exercise political power and agency. The study underscores the need for future research to better account for the sociopolitical and cultural context, political power, agency, and different models of impact in sustainability transitions.

In response to the increasing conflicts over natural resources, such as minerals, several states, including Sweden, have turned to deliberative democratic practices as a means of governance. Yet, despite significant efforts to incorporate deliberative elements into Sweden's mining governance system, the system falls short of fulfilling the promises typically associated with deliberative democracy, such as effective conflict management. This paper explores this paradox by examining how deliberation has been implemented in the system's institutional design and evaluates the extent to which it fosters conditions conducive to deliberation aligned with the ideals of deliberative democracy. The findings reveal a notable expansion of deliberative practices within the institutional design, particularly through provisions requiring consultation and dialogue with actors affected by mining and related activities. However, substantial deficiencies remain, especially regarding participant selection mechanisms, the prescriptions for participant interactions and the connection between these interactions and decision-making. These shortcomings hinder the realization of ideal deliberation, offering a compelling explanation for the system's difficulties in managing escalating conflicts. In response to these challenges, the study recommends institutional reforms aimed at enhancing the system's democratic qualities. Furthermore, it highlights the need for future research to investigate various institutional designs and their impact on deliberation within different governance systems. Such research could illuminate how these designs either facilitate or obstruct effective deliberation, ultimately contributing to the advancement of democracy and the ability of governance systems to address escalating natural resource conflicts.

Collaborative governance has been increasingly applied in the field of water governance. However, this approach is often criticized for overlooking the political nature of water governance and the necessity of collaboration across multiple dimensions. The river chief system (RCS) in China represents a collaborative water governance approach designed to address collaboration challenges in Chinese water governance sector and ultimately combat its severe river pollution. This study develops a conceptual framework to analyze the institutional design of the RCS and examine its effectiveness in structuring vertical, horizontal, and territorial collaborations in local water governance. Taking the RCS in Xiamen as a case study, we find that public entities predominantly engage in collaborative initiatives mandated by higher-level authorities, while collaborations between state and nonstate actors mainly focus on information collection and public environmental education. The collaborative processes under the RCS are characterized by the unchallenged authority of political leaders, exclusive decision-making mechanisms, restricted information flows, implicit pay-off structures, and limited involvement of nonstate actors. Consequently, the institutional design of the RCS falls short in fostering effective multidimensional collaboration among diverse actors. This study contributes to the literature on collaborative governance by offering insights into the institutional design of collaborative water governance within an authoritarian context and sheds lights on China's recent reforms of environmental governance.

The vast range of environmental governance case studies makes one thing clear: social processes are at the heart of environmental problems—and solutions. But fragmentation in how different contributions define and study environmental governance processes prevents us from drawing lessons from the field. What is the extent of knowledge cumulation in the field, and what gaps remain unfilled in this literature? We address these questions by analyzing the bibliometric citation network of English language academic research focused on environmental governance processes. We identify eight clusters of research, where four highly cited “poles” stand out: (1) social-ecological systems, (2) collaborative governance, (3) global environmental governance, and (4) political ecology. We identify four organizing concepts that are common to all clusters (scale, the importance of social outcomes, consideration of the environment, and the role of government), but with limited shared understandings of them. The field is wider than it is deep, limiting our ability to narrow down on a few overarching theoretical statements. We argue that environmental governance needs to link up with the environmental politics literature to be able address two important roadblocks in environmental governance processes: power asymmetries and trade-offs of environmental decisions.

Over the last decade, various studies have focused on the functioning of local food policy councils and their key role in institutionalizing participatory governance mechanisms involving stakeholders concerned with the promotion of sustainable food systems. Nevertheless, the literature remains scattered, inconclusive, and mostly dissociated from the sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are increasingly used by organizations and government agencies alike. Based on a systematic analysis of 99 academic articles, this realist synthesis sheds light on sustainability outcomes and key success factors of local food system governance. Findings show that local food systems can play a significant role in achieving sustainability, although the coverage of the SDGs remains very uneven across the objectives considered. The study also shows the key role of several collaborative governance principles—including broad participation, facilitative leadership, and consensus-building—in the success of these systems. Contributions to the literature and managerial implications are discussed.

The pledge to Leave No One Behind is central to the 2030 Agenda and cuts across all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To realize this cross-sectoral approach to inequality, policy coherence is considered an important tool. This article questions whether and how policy coherence leaves no one behind. We focus on the often-overlooked politics of policy coherence by studying gender inequalities in institutions, interests, and ideas in subnational governance processes for SDG implementation in India. Our findings show that policy coherence does not automatically reach the furthest behind in India. Despite ambitions to Leave No One Behind, SDG policy coherence processes are built around pre-existing, unequal and often siloed government structures, interests, and ideas. While this enhances national ownership, it also perpetuates inequalities in SDG policy coherence processes, including around gender. We argue that paradoxically, in seeking to implement all the SDGs equally for all, countries need to prioritize between competing goals in which historically prioritized institutions, interests, and ideas prevail over others. The article raises important questions about the universal applicability of policy coherence as means to achieve the SDGs and calls for further research on the synergies and trade-offs between policy coherence and Leave No One Behind in different (sub)national contexts.