Democratising planetary boundaries: experts,social values and deliberative risk evaluation in Earth system governance

ABSTRACT

Recent debates about the concept of planetary boundaries recall longstanding concerns about whether ecological limits are compatible with ecological democracy. The planetary boundaries framework (originally set out in Rockström et al., 2009a, 2009b) defines values for key Earth-system processes such as climate change and biodiversity that aim to maintain a ‘safe’ distance from thresholds or levels that could endanger human wellbeing. Despite having a significant impact in policy debates, the framework has been criticised as implying an expert-driven approach to governing global environmental risks that lacks democratic legitimacy. Drawing on research on deliberative democracy and the role of science in democratic societies, we argue that planetary boundaries can be interpreted in ways that remain consistent with democratic decision-making. We show how an iterative, dialogical process to formulate planetary boundaries and negotiate ‘planetary targets’ could form the basis for a democratically legitimate division of labour among experts, citizens and policy-makers in evaluating and responding to Earth-system risks. Crucial to this division of evaluative labour is opening up space for deliberative contestation about the value judgments inherent in collective responses to Earth-system risks, while also safeguarding the ability of experts to issue warnings about what they consider to be unacceptable risks.     

Sustainable regeneration: a guiding vision towards low-carbon transition?

While the concept of sustainable development brings together concepts of economic, environmental and social sustainability, much has been said regarding inherent tensions between them. Conflicts between economic and environmental objectives, in particular, have been noted as restraining efforts to instigate transitions to environmental sustainability, with growth ambitions limiting environmental policy to “win–win” cases. This paper argues that they can also play complementary roles in managing transitions by creating inclusive visions for rallying actors and resources. This is explored by looking at a case of sustainable regeneration in Wales, UK. Using as a case study the Arbed scheme, an area-based project established in 2009 to retrofit housing stock for energy efficiency, this paper shows how the scheme explicitly addresses economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability; and, in particular, how sustainable development aims constituted a guiding vision that supported the formation of actor and resource networks necessary for large-scale retrofitting.     

How do Local Governments in Mexico City Manage Global Warming?

ABSTRACT

Cities are both significant emitters of carbon dioxide and centres of innovations that may contribute to de-carbonizing our societies. More voices claim therefore that local authorities should be included in efforts to mitigate climate change. However, few studies have analysed how local authorities manage carbon and climate in urban areas in middle- and low-income countries. Yet, the institutional settings and governance structures of such cities are different from those prevailing in cities of wealthy countries. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring: (a) whether and—if so—how local authorities in Mexico City actually ‘manage’ carbon emissions; (b) how the city's evolving governance structures function and whether they ‘fit’ with the problem they address; and (c) how institutional capacity constrains authorities' management efforts. The paper suggests that policy networks and research groups have been critical in launching a climate agenda. Nevertheless, this has not been enough to push effective policies. Policymaking has been constrained by two sets of institutional factors: the problem of fit and a lack of institutional capacity.     

Framing Climate Change for Public Deliberation: What Role for Interpretive Social Sciences and Humanities?

Public deliberation is increasingly marshalled as a viable avenue for climate governance. Although climate change can be framed in multiple ways, it is widely assumed that the only relevant public meaning of climate change is that given by the natural sciences. Framing climate change as an inherently science-based public issue not only shields institutional power from scrutiny, but it can also foster an instrumental approach to public deliberation that can constrain imaginative engagement with present and future socio-environmental change. By fostering the normative value of pluralism as well as the substantive value of epistemic diversity, the interpretive social sciences and humanities can assist in opening up public deliberation on climate change such that alternative questions, neglected issues, marginalized perspectives and different possibilities can gain traction for policy purposes. Stakeholders of public deliberation are encouraged to reflect on the orchestration of the processes by which climate change is defined, solutions identified and political collectives convened.     

An international review of local governance for climate change: implications for Hong Kong

Cities have increasingly become the focal point for climate change initiatives. However, how cities respond to climate change challenges and through what mechanisms have remained largely unexplored. This paper develops a framework for local governance to examine and explain climate change initiatives in cities. Based on the analysis of 20 climate change initiatives in major cities and a detailed case study of Hong Kong, this paper has two main findings. First, local governments at the city level have an important role to play in climate change policies by embracing some key strategies (such as deliberation and partnership) and values (such as equity and legitimacy) of good governance. Second, by comparing and contrasting the experience in other cities, our case study of Hong Kong provides insights about the barriers that may limit a city's ability to adapt to new forms of governance that would enable it to better respond to climate change. The paper concludes by exploring the potential role of local governance as a model to strengthen climate change initiatives at the city level.     

“Conflict over Risks in Food Production: A Challenge for Democracy”

When it comes to conflict over risk management priorities in food production, a number of observers, including myself, have called for some sort of public deliberation as a means of resolving the moral disagreements underlying such conflicts. This paper asks how, precisely, such deliberation might be facilitated. It is shown that representative democracy and the liberal regulation that most Western democracies adhere to place important constraints on public deliberation. The challenge is to find forums for public deliberation that can operate within these constraints while still making a constructive contribution.     

A question of ‘fit’: local perspectives on top-down flood mitigation policies in Vermont

Despite consensus on the need to adapt to climate change, who should adapt, and how, remain open questions. While local-level actions are essential to adaptation, state and federal governments can play a substantial role in adaptation. In this paper, we investigate local perspectives on state-level flood mitigation policies in Vermont as a means of analysing what leads top-down adaptations to be effective in mobilizing local action. Drawing on interviews with town officials, we delineate local-level perspectives on Vermont's top-down policies and use those perspectives to develop a conceptual framework that presents the ‘fit’ between top-down policies and the local-level context as comprised of three components: Receptivity, Ease of Participation, and Design. We explain how these components and their interactions influence local-level action. This analysis points to how careful consideration of the components of ‘fit’ may lead to greater local-level uptake of top-down adaptation policies.     

Infrastructure in informal settlements: co-production of public services for inclusive governance

Recent studies on urban governance have advanced our understanding of how governance could become inclusive through community-based participation in urban development. However, a concrete process by which participatory public service provision in informal settlements consolidates inclusive governance has not been sufficiently evident in the context of the dynamic urban development witnessed in Africa. Drawing on a case study of the informal sanitation infrastructure known as a bio-centre, which has been introduced by a participatory upgrading programme in Nairobi, Kenya, this article proposes to pay attention to ways that informal settlers experience infrastructure, embed it into their everyday context of place-making and use it in unplanned manners. Inclusive governance that is effective in providing public services in informal settlements requires every development actor to be engaged in deliberating how to deal with such unplanned outcomes and eventually to co-produce services. This article argues that, rather than participation, communities’ capacity to enrol the state actors in the space of deliberation is crucial to make governance genuinely inclusive.     

Governing Climate Adaptation in the Local Arena: Challenges of Risk Management and Planning in Sweden

Abstract

This paper directs attention to conditions for climate adaptation as an important part of governing climate change in the local arena. Empirical focus is put on attempts to manage flood risks by means of risk management and planning in two Swedish municipalities. Following the need to widen our understanding of how, when and under what conditions climate adaptation occurs, three challenges are particularly emphasized from the case studies: facing the safety vs. scenery conflict where political priorities and reducing societal vulnerabilities prove difficult; the process of deciding what to adapt to, in which the troublesome role of knowledge is striking; and finally, taking responsibility for measures of flood protection. At the end of the paper, analytical generalizations illustrate the need to give increased attention to institutional challenges and challenges emanating from the science–policy interface in order to come to terms with the implementation deficit in governing climate change in the local arena.     

Citizen or consumer? Reconsidering energy citizenship

ABSTRACT

The transition to more sustainable energy systems has set about redefining the social roles and responsibilities of citizens. Implicit in this are expectations around participation, though the precise contours of what this might mean remain open. Debates around the energy transition have been skewed towards a normative construct of what it means to be a ‘good citizen’, the parameters for which are shaped by predetermined visions of statist and/or market-driven determinations of the energy systems of the future. This article argues that concepts such as ‘energy citizen’ are co-opted to reflect popular neoliberal discourses, and ignore crucial questions of unequal agency and access to resources. Paradoxically, official discourses that push responsibility for the energy transition onto the ‘citizen-as-consumer’ effectively remove agency from citizens, leaving them largely disconnected and disempowered. Consequently, energy citizenship needs to be reconceptualised to incorporate more collective and inclusive contexts for action. Considering how much energy consumption occurs in (traditionally female) domestic spheres, do conventional notions of citizenship (especially with regards to its associated rights and duties) need to be recalibrated in order for the concept to be usefully applied to the energy transition?     

Old ways for new days: Australian Indigenous peoples and climate change

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how Australia's Indigenous peoples understand and respond to climate change impacts on their traditional land and seas. Our results show that: (i) Indigenous peoples are observing modifications to their country due to climate change, and are doing so in both ancient and colonial time scales; (ii) the ways that climate change terminology is discursively understood and used is fundamental to achieving deep engagement and effective adaptive governance; (iii) Indigenous peoples in Australia exhibit a high level of agency via diverse approaches to climate adaptation; and (iv) humour is perceived as an important cultural component of engagement about climate change and adaptation. However, wider governance regimes consistently attempt to “upscale” Indigenous initiatives into their own culturally governed frameworks - or ignore them totally as they “don't fit” within neoliberal policy regimes. We argue that an opportunity exists to acknowledge the ways in which Indigenous peoples are agents of their own change, and to support the strategic localism of Indigenous adaptation approaches through tailored and place-based adaptation for traditional country.     

Translating strong principles into effective practice: environmental assessment in Ontario,Canada

This paper examines two fundamental and inter-related tensions relating to environmental assessment between the desire to be proactive, promoting sustainable development and the more traditional practice of preventing harm, as well as the need to balance a predictable, expeditious and efficient process with transparency and inclusive deliberation. Proposed reforms to the environmental assessment process in Ontario, Canada, are examined as a case in point, showing how the recommendations in Ontario are consistent with international trends. In particular, over-arching principles need to be embedded in more precise sector-specific policies to enable environmental assessment processes to meet these competing goals.     

Climate justice and energy: applying international principles to UK residential energy policy

This paper draws on climate justice principles developed in the context of international negotiations between national governments to assess the distribution of carbon reduction roles between different actors involved in residential energy use within the UK. In so doing, it aims to provide a new understanding of equity aspects of current residential policy and to highlight opportunities for more effective and equitable policy. The paper uses three criteria: rights and corresponding duties; mitigation responsibilities and capabilities. It applies them systematically to assess the roles of five key actors involved in residential energy use in the UK. The assessment finds a suboptimal distribution of actors’ duties, responsibilities and capabilities and roles and discusses whether and how a more effective and fair allocation of outcomes, in terms of carbon reduction and fuel poverty, could be achieved. In particular, it raises questions about whether the right actors are being legally obliged or incentivised to deliver energy efficiency improvements, and suggests that particular actors – local authorities and community groups – are under-used and require greater government support with capability. The paper represents the first use of international climate justice frameworks to investigate residential energy policy within a country.     

Constructing domestic retrofit as a new urban infrastructure: experimentation,equitability and contested priorities

ABSTRACT

British cities and residential suburbs were originally developed under a modernist growth logic: separating home from work, with little concern for energy use. But recent political and social priorities such as climate change and energy security have created an imperative to reduce domestic energy use, with many existing dwellings rendered “obsolete” on account of their poor energy efficiency. This precipitated a need to develop domestic retrofit – the modification of building fabrics and systems to improve their energy efficiency – as an urban infrastructure. The UK Government responded in 2011 with policies such as the “Green Deal”, through which coalitions of actors in cities including local authorities, voluntary sector organisations and private businesses were encouraged to experiment with place-based retrofit. This paper examines the challenges and effects of developing a domestic retrofit infrastructure in a North London borough under particularly challenging policy conditions. We develop a hybrid framework for understanding the process and product of this place-based experimentation and through this we ask two questions: 1. How did both local and national conditions enable and limit the development of this infrastructure? 2. Was the emerging urban infrastructure functional and equitable? In Haringey’s case, a strong local political agenda positioned retrofit as a development opportunity and vehicle for reducing inequality, but national priorities around market-making and technological fixes dominated emerging responses. Whilst Haringey’s efforts in a difficult policy context did result in retrofits and improvements to around a thousand properties, the emerging infrastructure of retrofit services was incomplete, inequitable and temporary.     

Energy cooperatives in Germany – an example of successful alternative economies?

ABSTRACT

Because of their democratic governance and value-driven approach cooperatives are often regarded as a prime example for alternative economies and contributing to (more) equitable economic development. Furthermore, they theoretically combine production and consumption and are often regionally-oriented. The recent boom of German renewable-energy cooperatives provides an interesting example of how cooperatives can also make an important contribution to sustainable development, here the German energy transition, and its social acceptance. The paper will first show how a specific regulatory environment supported this development and then analyse how German energy cooperatives cope with legal changes leading to less favourable institutional conditions. Based on a comprehensive survey, we examine whether they can, apart from their legal form, be regarded as alternative economies. Our analysis is guided by a set of criteria derived from Gibson-Graham’s diverse-economies framework, including voluntary and paid work, (origin of) borrowed capital, size and structure of membership, business goals and strategies, especially after the legal changes, as well as regional orientation. We will show how different categories of German energy cooperatives differ with regard to their business models, alternative-economy characteristics and coping strategies. The future development of energy cooperatives in Germany will very likely be as diverse as their recent history, thus illustrating the diversity of alternative-economy organisations as stipulated by Gibson-Graham. Most of them, however, deal with the new regulatory environment pro-actively and are developing business models, which are independent from public support and might lead to new cooperative strategies at the shifting interfaces between state, market and civil society.     

Project coordinators’ views on climate adaptation costs and benefits – justice implications

ABSTRACT

As local climate adaptation activity increases, so does the number of questions about costs, benefits, financing and the role that economic considerations play in adaptation-related decision-making and policy. Through five cases, covering a range of climate risks and types of adaptation measures, this paper critically examines Swedish project coordinators’ perceptions of costs and benefits in already-implemented climate adaptation measures. Our study finds that project coordinators make use of different system boundaries – on temporal, geographical and administrative scales – in their cost/benefit evaluations, making the practice of determining adaptation costs arbitrary and hard to compare. We further demonstrate that the project coordinators interpret costs and benefits in a manner that downplays the intangible environmental and social costs and benefits arising from the adaptation measures, despite their own experience of how such measures negatively impact upon social value. The exclusion of social and environmental costs and benefits has severe implications for justice, as it can bias decisions against people and ecosystems that are affected negatively. Based on the findings, we propose three tentative social justice dilemmas in local climate adaptation planning and implementation: 1. Cost and benefit distribution across scales; 2. The identification and valuation of non-market effects; and 3. The equitable allocation of costs and benefits.     

The importance of the will to improve: how ‘sustainability’ sidelined local livelihoods in a carbon-forestry investment in Uganda

This paper describes a ‘win–win’ discourse on local sustainable development and global climate change mitigation regarding Kachung, a Swedish–Norwegian climate forestry investment in Uganda certified under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). In many ways, this investment is a typical example of how private interests and capital accumulation are prioritised over local concerns in natural resource management under neoliberalism. This study, however, indicated that investors had genuine intentions of creating mutual benefits for the global environment and local people. Drawing on Li (2007), we show that this ‘will to improve’ was nevertheless constructed in ways that resulted in prioritisation of global climate change mitigation over local context-specific concerns.

We identify three core factors making the win–win discourse around Kachung plantation especially resilient: (i) the perceived urgency of climate change mitigation, (ii) the apolitical framing of ‘sustainability’ as an environmental issue that can be fixed through external technical interventions and (iii) the devaluation of local and context-specific knowledge. We end by suggesting that research on the neoliberalisation of nature focus more on analysing the rationales behind specific interventions. This would leave us better equipped to suggest how such interventions should be modified to produce true wins for local contexts.     

Between science and local knowledge: improving the communication of climate change to rural agriculturists in the Bolgatanga Municipality,Ghana

ABSTRACT

There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that global climate is changing with associated devastating, yet differential impacts on different world regions. This, therefore, calls for efforts to improve our understanding of the phenomenon as a way of enhancing mitigation and adaptation measures. Although a lot has been done in this respect, the present study examines the extent to which misnomers associated with the calendar months and local climate events can be employed to convey the phenomenon of climate change to rural agriculturists in the Bolgatanga municipality. The study establishes that the names of the calendar months, which serve as goalposts for local agricultural practices no longer portray their true meaning due to climate change. The study, therefore, recommends the use of nuanced ways of communicating climate change to local agriculturists, using scientific research, lived experiences as well as socially and culturally embedded tools such as misnomers associated with local climate events.     

Whose energy transition is it,anyway? Organisation and ownership of the Energiewende in villages,cities and regions

As one of the most ambitious national energy transition initiatives worldwide, the German Energiewende is attracting a huge amount of attention globally in both policy and research circles. The paper explores the implementation of Germany's energy transition through the lens of organisation and ownership in urban and regional contexts. Following a summary of the principal institutional challenges of the Energiewende at local and regional levels the paper develops a novel way of conceptualising the institutional to urban and regional energy transitions in terms of agency and power, ideas and discourse, and commons and ownership. This analytical heuristic is applied to a two-tier empirical study of the Berlin–Brandenburg region. The first tier involves a survey of the organisational landscape of energy infrastructures and services in cities, towns and villages in Brandenburg. The second tier comprises a case study of current, competing initiatives for (re-)gaining ownership of the power grid and utility in Berlin. The paper draws conclusions on the diverse and dynamic organisational responses to the Energiewende at the local level, what these tell us about urban and regional energy governance and how they are inspired by – or in opposition to – new forms of collective ownership resonant of recent debates on reclaiming the commons. It concludes with observations on how relational approaches to institutional research and the notion of the commons can guide and inspire future research on socio-technical transitions in general, and urban energy transitions in particular.     

Opening Up for Participation in Agro-Biodiversity Conservation: The Expert-Lay Interplay in a Brazilian Social Movement

In science and environmental studies, there is a general concern for the democratization of the expert-lay interplay. However, the democratization of expertise does not necessarily lead to more sustainable decisions. If citizens do not take the sustainable choice, what should experts and decision makers do? Should the expert-lay interplay be dissolved? In thinking about how to shape the expert-lay interplay in a better way in agro-biodiversity conservation, I take the case of the MST (Movimento Sem Terra/Landless People’s Movement), possibly the largest rural movement in Latin America. The MST is in a process of turning towards environmentalism. It has adopted agroecology, a democratically oriented knowledge field. However, not all of the farmers were willing to adopt new environmentalist ideas and practices. Through ethnographic research, I analyze how expertise was recognized and redistributed within the MST, attending particularly to the role of MST coordinators and technicians. I explore how participation was framed and put into action. The adoption of agroecology brought to the MST a new and more inclusive map of expertise, but it also influenced new social distinctions within the communities. In part, farmers’ knowledge was labeled as ignorance. This may close down possibilities for dialogue as well as for sustainability. The paper suggests that experts’ power for discriminating among lay knowledges should come together with a responsibility for opening spaces for dialogue and action. One way of doing so could be by adding “interactional reflexivity” to experts’ expertise.