Geoengineering and sustainability

ABSTRACT

Geoengineering is regarded by advocates as a creative and responsible technological option in the face of a climate emergency. Critics often see it as a hubristic attempt to play God, with disastrous consequences for the planet and humanity. These antipodal perspectives are represented by the ideal types of Prometheans and Gaians. Prometheans and Gaians typically talk past each other. The geoengineering debate can be made more fruitful by well articulating their respective positions and subsequently situating them in the discourse of sustainability. A sustainability orientation does not answer the troubling question whether geoengineering should be developed and deployed. But it can foster a ‘fusion of horizons’ between Prometheans and Gaians, providing common ground in an otherwise polarized debate and making a more productive dialogue possible.     

Australian Greens party members and supporters: their profiles and activities

In an era of widespread party membership decline, there is debate over the utility, within the ‘European’ tradition, of conceptualising party membership as the locus of individual party engagement, and of maintaining membership and supportership as distinct categories in analysing party activism. This debate is particularly relevant to Green parties, which, through their particular social movement origins and emphasis on grass-roots democracy, bring into question the assumption that the activities and profile of members and supporters are functionally different. Using original data gathered from two surveys of Australian Greens party members and supporters undertaken in 2012 and 2013, the political activity, associational membership, ideological position, and demographic characteristics of these two groups are compared. While active party members are distinctive in their party-specific political activities and their ideological positioning, there is much less difference between the rest of the formal party membership and the party’s active supporter base.     

Divergent neighbors: corporatism and climate policy networks in Finland and Sweden

ABSTRACT

Previous research has suggested that corporatist polities tend to enact more ambitious environmental policies than others. Here it is argued that the macro concept of corporatism can be dissected into three components: inclusiveness, consensualism and strength of tripartite organisations. These components of corporatism can be measured at the meso-level of policy networks. It is proposed that inclusiveness and consensualism are related to ambitious climate policy but exclusive tripartite coalitions can be detrimental for the ambitiousness of climate policy. This argument is backed by evidence from policy network surveys in two similar corporatist countries where climate change policies diverge: Sweden, where policies are ambitious, and Finland, where they are less so. It is found that in Sweden the climate change policy network is more consensual and slightly more inclusive, while in Finland tripartite organisations play a strong role.     

Implementing EU climate and energy policies in Poland: policy feedback and reform

European Union (EU) climate/energy targets and policies are poised for the first full climate policy cycle – from adoption and implementation of the policy package for 2020, to reform for 2030. A dynamic approach to the ways in which EU policies affect policy development is developed by applying theories of domestic implementation, policy feedback and integration. Implementation experiences in Poland – the ‘least climate ambitious’ EU member state – affected Polish preferences for reformed EU policies. Existing EU policies, their ‘fit’ with Poland’s energy interests and change in anticipation of future EU policies explain much of the variation in preferences. Second, policy feedback from Poland significantly affected the EU 2030 climate and energy framework. As yet, the EU has succeeded only partly in gathering momentum through a ‘snowball’ effect whereby positive policy feedback from implementation generates further steps.     

Adaptation policy and community discourse: risk,vulnerability, and just transformation

How can public engagement assist in the development of just processes and outcomes in adaptation discourse and policymaking? A concern with justice is at the center of thinking about adaptation that is not only resilient, but also public, engaging, and transformative. Theoretically, the intersection of adaptation, transformation, and environmental and climate justice is examined, before exploring the specific concerns and normative foundations for adaptation policy articulated by local governments, environmental groups, and local residents engaged in adaptation planning in Australia. Despite a discursive disconnect between governmental focus on a risk or resilience-based approach and a community concern with the vulnerability of basic needs and capabilities of everyday life, deliberative engagement in adaptation planning can both address issues of justice and represent a transformative practice.     

Microchipped bags and waste sorting

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - We evaluate the effectiveness of attaching microchips to bags for curbside collection in reducing unsorted urban solid waste and increasing the fraction...     

Climate engineering and human rights

ABSTRACT

In this Forum, three scholars discuss how climate engineering will pose novel human rights challenges, and may well force reconsideration of how human rights are applied as a guide to action. Following a short introduction, the first section introduces three competing approaches to human rights, arguing views which emphasize fairness or attempt to maximize satisfaction are more promising than one viewing human rights as inviolable ‘side-constraints’. The second section draws lessons from climate migration that are relevant for climate engineering in terms of incorporating a human rights approach to duties, rights, and participation. The final section compares the ‘needs-based’ and ‘rights-based’ approaches to humanitarian work in the face of climate change and climate engineering, raising concerns for duty-bearers and right-holders. The Forum’s conclusion draws together points of overlap and suggests a path forward for policy and research on this topic.     

Sincerity as Strategy: Green Movements and the Problem of Reconciling Deliberative and Instrumental Action

ABSTRACT

Social movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This ‘dual orientation’ places them theoretically between social movement studies’ focus on strategic considerations and the ‘sincere’ (truthful) communication envisioned by democratic theorists to be a condition for ‘authentic’ deliberation, in which actors genuinely seek to understand each other’s views. Engaging with both fields of theory, a framework is developed for separating actions that are strategic, sincere and employ sincerity as strategy. Actors choose sincerity as a strategy when they practice truthful reasoning as a means to advance their interests in the public sphere. As illustrated by green movements, the concept captures how activists may handle three risks in public discourse: commercialization, politicization and idealization.     

Legitimating the environmental injustices of war: toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq and Afghanistan

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US Department of Defense burned the majority of its solid waste in open-air pits or trenches, producing large amounts of potentially hazardous emissions. While journalists have covered stories of US service members who link their illnesses to these fumes, they have almost entirely ignored potential civilian impacts. However, satellite images demonstrate that pollution from open-air trash burning on US bases could not have impacted US personnel without also harming Iraqi and Afghan civilians living near bases, indicating that burn-pit pollution is an important, if unacknowledged, environmental justice issue. Content analysis of news articles shows the extent to which civilian impacts have been left out of mainstream US media reporting on burn-pit pollution. This selective attention is symptomatic of the way military violence is legitimated, which involves a complicit news media that typically overlooks the humanitarian impacts of war.     

Towards deliberative and pragmatic co-management: a comparison between inshore fisheries authorities in England and Scotland

In seeking to answer the question ‘who should be included in fisheries co-management?’, a constructive critique of the existing co-management literature is provided by filling the gaps of Habermas’s deliberative theory of democracy with Dewey’s pragmatism. Three conditions for ensuring democratic co-management are extrapolated from the theories: actors’ authority over decision making (empowerment), actors’ diversity (membership), and the right to self-nomination (procedures for external inclusion). The theoretical insights developed are supported with two examples of co-management institutions for inshore fisheries in the UK: Scottish Inshore Fisheries Groups (IFGs) and English Inshore Fisheries Conservation Authorities (IFCAs).     

The green state and industrial decarbonisation

ABSTRACT

The large share of carbon emitted by energy-intensive industries in the extraction and processing of basic materials must be limited to decarbonise society and the economy. Ways in which the state can govern industrial decarbonisation and contributes to green state theory are explored by addressing a largely ignored issue: the green state’s industrial relations and its role in industrial governance. With insights from a Swedish case study, the tension between the state’s economic imperative and ecological concerns in greening industry are shown to persist. However, as the energy-intensive industry’s previously privileged position in the economy is weakening, industry is opened to decarbonisation strategies. While the case exposes a number of governance challenges, it also suggests potential areas where the state can pursue decarbonisation in energy-intensive industry and points the way to an active role of the green state in governing industrial decarbonisation and greening industry.     

What room for politics and change in global climate governance? Addressing gender in co-benefits and safeguards

Questions of equity, gender, power and rights are central to environmental justice in climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation). Drawing on the ideas of co-benefits and safeguards, the strategies for challenging mainstream discourse on gender in REDD+ – from the outside and within – are examined of two organisations that have attempted to bring a political concept – gender – into the largely technical discourse of climate policy. The analysis points to the risks of co-option that women’s organisations face, trying to challenge and change the mainstream discourse on gender in climate policy-making. The need for diverse and flexible strategies for resistance and influence in order to seize opportunities that may arise in countering the depoliticising force of global climate governance are highlighted.     

The contested politics of the Asian atom: peripheralisation and nuclear power in South Korea and Japan

South Korea and Japan have been unwaveringly committed to a nuclear-focused energy supply system despite the contested nature of that technology and the Fukushima accident in 2011. The socio-political consequences of four nuclear-related facilities (Ulju, Gyeongju, Futaba, and Rokkasho) are explored through the lens of social peripheralisation. This framework suggests that nuclear facilities will migrate to communities that are geographically remote, economically marginal, politically powerless, culturally defensive, and environmentally degraded. Nuclear infrastructures in the four cases are imposed on peripheral regions, impairing not only the structure of local economies and political power, but also creating a discriminative structure in terms of social and environmental inequality. Peripheralisation suggests a deeper dynamic by which pro-nuclear attitudes become ‘locked in’ socially and culturally so that communities come to depend on the very processes that made them peripheral. Community dynamics, subnational struggles, and contests over local power relations may determine the future of nuclear power.     

National identities,international roles,and the legitimation of climate leadership: Germany and Norway compared

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) confers an obligation on developed states to lead in mitigation. This obligation challenges traditional conceptions of the modern state by calling forth a more outward looking state that is able to serve both the national and international communities in the service of global climate protection. Yet, the more skeptical theories of the ecological state suggest that climate leaders will only emerge if they can connect their climate strategy to the traditional state imperatives of economic growth or national security. How the governments of Germany and Norway, both relative climate leaders with ongoing fossil-fuel dependencies, have legitimated their climate policies and diplomacy is examined through a comparative discourse analysis. While both governments rely heavily on discourses of Green growth, they also construct national identities and international role conceptions that serve purposes beyond themselves.     

‘Power with’ and ‘power to’ in environmental politics and the transition to sustainability

Scholars of environmental politics demand serious reform of international governance and institutions to protect planet Earth. There is therefore an urgent need to discuss what causes change and gridlock in environmental politics. Serious reform is inextricably tied up with questions of power. The diversity with which studies on environmental politics understand power is exposed through three ideal type concepts: power with (learning and cooperation), power to (resistance and empowerment) and power over (coercion and manipulation). So far, scholars have mainly used analysis of coercive power (over) to explain gridlock in environmental politics; also needed is explicit acknowledgement of coaction and individual agency that can enable transition to more sustainable societies.     

Climate laws in small European states: symbolic legislation and limits of diffusion in Ireland and Finland

ABSTRACT

The past decade has seen the introduction of framework climate change laws in several countries. The development of climate laws in two small European states, Ireland and Finland, both of which introduced national climate laws in 2015, are examined. Two questions are addressed. First, to what extent do later adopters of climate policy instruments draw on the examples of pioneering legislation? Second, how and why are pioneering climate policy instruments modified by later adopters? In both cases, the 2008 UK Climate Change Act was a source of inspiration in the early stages, particularly for civil society campaigns. Thereafter, domestic interests mobilised to remove from legislative proposals the most pioneering and ambitious parts of the UK model. The result, in both cases, was enactment of climate laws that resembled only very loosely the UK Climate Change Act.     

Adoption and diffusion of conservation agriculture technology in Zambia: the role of social and institutional networks

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - This study utilizes recall data from smallholder farmers in selected provinces in Zambia to examine the role of social and institutional networks, as...