Toward sustainable livelihoods after war: Reconstituting rural land tenure systems

Land tenure plays a primary role in sustainable development efforts. However armed conflict and its repercussions reconfigure the network of social relations upon which all land tenure systems depend. In post‐conflict settings new laws have the opportunity to address tenure issues in the context of what people are already doing ‘on the ground’, with a view to moving from the fluidity of post‐conflict situations to a more solidified and peaceful social and legal environment. However there exists a lack of tools to analyze postwar land tenure and the prospects for reconstituting tenure systems to support recovery and development. This paper uses the Sustainable Livelihoods framework to examine postwar land tenure issues in order to draw out latent opportunities within emergent informal smallholder tenure constructs which may have utility in the reconstitution of national tenure systems.     

Policy integration for adaptive water governance: Learning from Scotland's experience

This paper contributes to on-going attempts at bringing together two influential ideas in water governance: Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) and adaptive governance. In particular, a tension remains between the call in IWRM for the use of formal institutions, such as river basin organisations, to secure public policy integration, and the assumptions in adaptive governance in favour of informal collaboration between essentially independent policy actors. To clarify this relationship, this article draws on theoretical research on public policy integration, and uses these insights in an empirical setting to identify mechanisms that can facilitate effective policy integration for adaptive water governance. The research is based on recent attempts in Scotland to implement IWRM ideas to improve flood management. Several governance mechanisms were adopted to facilitate the integration of flood, water and rural land use policies. Six Scottish policy regimes are analysed using documentary sources and interviews. Results challenge the idea that collaboration should primarily be built on either river basin organisations or informal mechanisms. We identify a mix of informal and statutory-based mechanisms which may secure political and technocratic commitment to policy integration.     

Carbon capture and storage-desirability from a risk management point of view

Environmental and safety risks related to carbon capture and storage concern leakages and accidental releases during transport and geological storage. Based on principles widely accepted in the EU and beyond in the discussion about the where’s and why’s of nuclear waste repositories, this paper discusses the desirability of carbon capture and storage from a risk management point of view, focusing on environmental risks on the global level (climate change). On this basis it is concluded that, if the key energy issue of coming generations, not just in Europe but all around the world, is not the abundance of fossil resources but rather an unacceptably high probability of global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions, then the solution should not include any massive hiding of the emissions but entirely focus on the avoidance based on improved technology in power plants and other industrial installations.     

A new tool to map the major worldviews in the Netherlands and USA,and explore how they relate to climate change

For addressing climate change, public support for changes in policy is needed, as well changes in individual lifestyles. Both of these appear to be intimately related with people’s worldviews. Understanding these worldviews is therefore essential. In order to research and ‘map’ them, we translated the theoretical ‘Integrative Worldview Framework’ (IWF) into an empirical, quantitative approach. We constructed a worldview-scale aiming to distinguish between four major worldviews – labeled traditional, modern, postmodern, and integrative – and explored their interface with opinions and behaviors with respect to climate change. The survey was conducted with representative samples of citizens in the Netherlands and the USA (n = 527 and n = 556). The hypothesized worldviews were found in the data with a reasonable degree of reliability, especially in the Dutch sample. We also found consistent relationships between these worldview-clusters and a range of opinions, political priorities, and behaviors. In both countries postmoderns and integratives displayed significantly more concern about climate change as well as more sustainable behaviors, compared with moderns and traditionals. The implications of these findings for environmental policy and social science are noteworthy.     

A multiple criteria evaluation of sustainable agricultural development models using AHP

Selection of the appropriate agricultural development model has become an important issue in Iran. Using data from Fars province of Iran, the purpose of this paper is to use analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for selecting between the two competing sustainable agricultural development models, which have been developed based on the general tenets of Ecological Modernization (EM) and De-Modernization (DM) theories. Farmers, environmentalists, board members of rural cooperative, rural women and experts from Fars Agricultural (Jehad-e-Keshavarzi) Organization participated in application of AHP to this study. They applied AHP to determine the priority of DM and EM based sustainable agricultural development models. Each group determined the priority of the two models for sustainable agricultural development. The findings indicated that ecological criteria i.e. wise use of resources, environmental protection and product quality are the most important criteria for sustainable agriculture of Iran, followed by economic criterion employment and social criterion participation. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to determine the critical factors that affected the priority of alternatives. The results indicated that EM-based sustainable agricultural development model has a higher priority as the theoretical base of agricultural development of Iran. Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue     

Comparative capitalism and sustainable development: Stakeholder capitalism and co-management in the Kenyan fisheries sub sector

This paper argues that stakeholder capitalism is more appropriate to natural resource management and rural development in Africa than other varieties of capitalism. It examines different management arrangements in Kenyan Lake Victoria fisheries resources to argue that whilst stakeholder capitalism is still far from being the mainstream model of capitalism in Kenya, theoretically and empirically, it is more appropriate to sustainable development than the Anglo‐Saxon variety of capitalism that the country inherited from its British colonizers. The paper demonstrates that the concepts of ownership and management rights are social, economic and political constructs that are continuously contested, with huge implications for sustainable development and natural resource management.     

Sustainable tourism development in remote regions? Questions arising from research in the North Kimberley,Australia

This paper is concerned with the sustainable development of a self-drive tourist destination in the remote region in Northern Australia. It first compares officially used data on visitor profiles to the information collected in the survey. Differences between data collected and available secondary data imply that tourism planning should include collection of region-specific tourism information to guide and mitigate potential environmental changes. Natural landscape features are the key attraction for visitors to the region. Visitor satisfaction levels with the current state of the destination are high. However, local residents reported perceived negative impacts of tourism, in particular on amenities and the ecology of the landscape. Visitors also reported behavior that might contribute to environmental impacts. Implications of the findings, in the context of future destination planning, are discussed.     

A “measurable” definition of sustainable development based on closed cycles of resources and its application to energy systems

Human society consumes resources that it is not able to reproduce. Human activities are still based on “open cycles,” starting from a condition of natural environmental balance and reaching an environmental imbalance. The challenging scope of scientific and technological research towards sustainability appears clear if it is based on this analysis: to find development systems based on “closed cycles” of resources. The challenging objective of realizing closed cycles leads to a definition of sustainability that indicates the path to sustainable development, as well as stating the general principle. It also provides a key to the qualitative measurement of sustainability. This means that the sustainability level of a system can be measured by measuring its capacity to avoid the consumption of resources. Zero consumption is a necessary condition for sustainability, and brings about as a side effect the highly desired “zero-waste” result. Materials entering the proposed endless scheme pass through the process of usefulness without losing their capacity to feed the system again after being used. Thus, the concept of “consumption” itself is replaced by one of “use” when resources are inserted into closed loops capable of feeding human development. The application of the closed cycle sustainability criterion particularly displays its feasibility, and a theoretical guiding role, in the energy sector. Energy vectors such as hydrogen and electricity enable the closure of the energy resources loop by effectively approaching the objective of “zero consumption” (and the side result of “zero waste”) through already demonstrated technological solutions.     

Assessing the role of consumers in sustainable product policies

A global analysis shows that considerable forces contribute nowadays to the perpetuation of the so-called “developed” model of consumption, and its extension to growing parts of the world, despite reiterated calls for “modification of production and consumption patterns”. Environmental product regulation can be situated in this general perspective. This paper returns to the framing of policies devoted to ecologically sustainable consumption, taking the example of the Integrated product policy at the European level. How are the objectives of such policies defined? What instruments are privileged? Comparing theoretical approaches with policy design, we focus on the role devoted to consumers in these contexts. Bringing in literature evidence, survey results and findings from an original study, we argue that appropriate knowledge of the diversity of consumers’ attitudes and about the limitations of their possible actions is not properly taken into account in product policies, notably when information and voluntary tools are dominant. From this point of view, environmental product regulations are well justified, but they should, as all policy instruments implicating consumers, take careful notice of their situation.