Climate policy support under political consensus: exploring the varying effect of partisanship and party cues

By creating attitudinal rifts among partisan voters, political polarization is expected to negatively affect chances of effectively mitigating climate change. While such expectations generally have found support, less attention has been paid to the opposite claim that political consensus should eliminate the partisan dimension in climate change politics. This study tests this claim by studying how party identification, and party cues specifically, affects public policy attitudes in a context defined by political consensus. Using data from a large online access panel in Sweden, party identification and party cues are shown to matter for policy attitudes even in a consensus context. This effect is not limited to certain issues but is found across a wide range of policies, and the effect of party cues, for a given issue, varies across parties. The implications of this study and areas for future work are discussed.     

废铅酸蓄电池污染防治技术及相关政策分析

废铅酸蓄电池具有一定的回收价值,但生产过程和回收过程都容易造成污染。为了引导企业对废旧电池进行正确处理,也为了防止环境被破坏,必须采取科学合理的技术和工艺,并遵循国家相关政策,本文就对此进行了分析,希望能给相关工作提供借鉴。     

The Dynamics of Justification in Policy Reform: Insights from Water Policy Debates in Ireland

Policy reform can be complex and fraught with contending arguments. Although much research has been conducted into the politics of coalition formation, less attention has been devoted to legitimating logics in policy reform. Drawing on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, this exploratory study addresses this deficit by examining the influence of justifications deployed in policy debates. The paper analyses the role of shifting reasoning in contentious debates concerning attempts to reform water policy, including the introduction of domestic water charges in Ireland. Employing data from parliamentary deliberations, the paper traces the changing forms of justification used by those favouring and opposing the reforms. This examination suggests the importance of aligning an argument’s content with the shifting context into which it is introduced. The paper highlights the benefits of an investigative approach concerning policy justification for understanding policy reform dynamics at the intersection of politics and environmental communication.     

挥发性有机废气治理技术的现状与进展

本文通过查阅文献资料,总结了当前企业挥发性有机废气产生情况、政策管理办法以及相关处理技术,并分析了未来挥发性有机废气治理政策发展趋势,旨在提高挥发性有机废气治理效率,提高空气环境质量。     

武汉市环境责任险实践评析和政策路径

在环境污染事故高发、未来全国环境政策将更多地借助于市场力量的背景下,评析了在武汉市实施环境污染责任险的必要性,分析了武汉市环境污染责任险实践中所存在的问题,并提出了未来政策改革的建议。指出近期内武汉市应主要在重点行业、饮用水源地推进政策试点,相关部门应积极配合、联合研发政策推行所需的关键支撑技术和信息平台,并积极培育政策向成熟发展所需配套的法律及政策环境。     

Collaborative networks and new ways of knowing

To move beyond legal and regulatory gridlock around water issues in the California Bay-Delta, a new inter-agency initiative, commonly known as CALFED, was created in 1994. CALFED has been an ongoing experiment in policy innovation. Part of the change in management practice has involved constructing new arenas that engage multiple perspectives and transform regulatory impasse into provisional steps forward. We examine the construction of so-called boundary objects, which are forums and policy instruments that cross group boundaries and foster integrative deliberation. We compare the design and action of two boundary objects created by CALFED, namely the Environmental Water Account (EWA) and the Water Use Efficiency (WUE) program. We find that the presence of the boundary object, in itself, does little to explain the success of each policy experiment. Rather, the answer lies in the types of network interactions that result, along with the way meaning is coproduced. In fact, rather than create new patterns of interrelationship (e.g., between fish habitat advocates and pump station operators), the boundary object might further embed institutionalized routines. To more deeply understand what makes the new institution an integrative one, we introduce the concept of Ways of Knowing which explains how new knowledge emerges from the network of new relationships.     

我国重点行业环境保护与节能减排宏观要求及政策建议

从我国目前节能减排的形势出发,结合几大高污染、高能耗行业的环保现状,给出了能够实现环保与节能减排的总体原则并重点提出了相应的宏观政策建议。     

The evolution of climate policies - the role of learning and evaluations

All member states of the EU have had to develop climate strategies following the commitment to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol. The evolution of the strategies provides insights into the learning that takes place at the level of policy development and offers material for analysing how ex ante and ex post evaluations have contributed to this learning. In the analysis, Finland is used as a case demonstrating different levels and types of learning, from deeper reframing to political learning. The results show that the full potential of the evaluations has not been utilised, partly because they have been constrained by their mandate. Greater openness and transparency in the policy processes would create favourable conditions for independent evaluations that could provide additional input to the policy processes. This would support social and reflexive learning and allow for greater adaptability.     

The role of agri‐environment schemes in conservation and environmental management

Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern in Europe depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri‐environment schemes (AES) are designed partly to address this. They are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We reviewed the structure of current AES across Europe. Since a 2003 review questioned the overall effectiveness of AES for biodiversity, there has been a plethora of case studies and meta‐analyses examining their effectiveness. Most syntheses demonstrate general increases in farmland biodiversity in response to AES, with the size of the effect depending on the structure and management of the surrounding landscape. This is important in the light of successive EU enlargement and ongoing reforms of AES. We examined the change in effect size over time by merging the data sets of 3 recent meta‐analyses and found that schemes implemented after revision of the EU's agri‐environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision. Furthermore, schemes aimed at areas out of production (such as field margins and hedgerows) are more effective at enhancing species richness than those aimed at productive areas (such as arable crops or grasslands). Outstanding research questions include whether AES enhance ecosystem services, whether they are more effective in agriculturally marginal areas than in intensively farmed areas, whether they are more or less cost‐effective for farmland biodiversity than protected areas, and how much their effectiveness is influenced by farmer training and advice? The general lesson from the European experience is that AES can be effective for conserving wildlife on farmland, but they are expensive and need to be carefully designed and targeted.