The San Francisco Bay-Delta: A failure of decision-making capacity

The paper reviews the history of Bay-Delta decision-making in California in order to highlight the continuity between what happened with CALFED and what happened in the preceding decades since water project deliveries began in 1949. Throughout this period, there has been intense conflict about whether and how to transfer water from the Bay-Delta to users elsewhere—a conflict marked by a fundamental opposition of interests among stakeholders. We document how the State of California has failed to organize itself effectively to resolve this conflict and make a decision on how to manage the Delta. The strategy consistently adopted by the State was to encourage the main parties – agricultural and urban water diverters, and fisheries and other instream-protection interests – to work out a solution among themselves, rather than imposing one externally. However, economic theory suggests that a bargaining solution is unlikely to exist because of the extreme opposition of interest among the parties. The Bay-Delta history amply confirms this theoretical prediction. Thus, the State's strategy of relying on voluntary agreement to resolve the issue is fundamentally misconceived and is, at some level, an abdication of its responsibility.     

The means do not justify the ends: A comment on CALFED

The state-federal CALFED process was more successful in transforming the means of thinking about decisions regarding California Bay-Delta resource management than in achieving the desired policy ends. Case studies in this special issue document how CALFED helped change the dynamics between stakeholders and agency managers; between scientists and implementers; and between endangered species managers and water project operators. In most cases, however, the new relationships and agreements failed to achieve the desired policy outcomes. The new tools and approaches that CALFED fostered can complement and support – but not substitute for – the obligation of policy makers to honestly confront and resolve fundamental oppositions of interest over resource management issues.     

Marginalization by collaboration: Environmental justice as a third party in and beyond CALFED

Governance and planning of ecosystem and water management within the California Bay-Delta, a critical component of California's water economy, have been characterized by a range of innovations in collaboration and conflict resolution. Despite legal mandates to incorporate environmental justice, the California Bay-Delta Authority's (CBDA) policy-development process and the subsequent Delta Vision process have systematically marginalized the role of environmental justice in California's water policy. We suggest that environmental justice in Bay-Delta planning can be understood as a “third party” with a tenuous seat at the CALFED water management table. As such environmental justice is a useful lens through which to assess the state's broader commitments and capacities relative to equity as a planning principal and outcome. We interpret the fate of environmental justice within Bay-Delta planning as indicative of the inherent tensions between systems based on increasing market dominance and state legitimation and the values of environmental justice based on distributive, procedural, and cognitive justice. We construct a model of marginalization and environmental injustice in collaborative planning to illustrate these tensions. We draw upon experiences of members of the Environmental Justice Sub-Committee of CBDA's Bay Delta Public Advisory Committee, as well as interviews with other key environmental justice interests, and a comprehensive review of internal and public CBDA documents relating to the environmental justice program including budgets and program plans, and ethnographic field work. We conclude that by learning from the mistakes of Bay-Delta planning, a positive model of collaborative, environmental justice-based planning for water and ecosystem management is possible.     

Integrating scientific knowledge into large-scale restoration programs: the CALFED Bay-Delta Program experience

Integrating science into resource management activities is a goal of the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, a multi-agency effort to address water supply reliability, ecological condition, drinking water quality, and levees in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta of northern California. Under CALFED, many different strategies were used to integrate science, including interaction between the research and management communities, public dialogues about scientific work, and peer review. This paper explores ways science was (and was not) integrated into CALFED's management actions and decision systems through three narratives describing different patterns of scientific integration and application in CALFED. Though a collaborative process and certain organizational conditions may be necessary for developing new understandings of the system of interest, we find that those factors are not sufficient for translating that knowledge into management actions and decision systems. We suggest that the application of knowledge may be facilitated or hindered by (1) differences in the objectives, approaches, and cultures of scientists operating in the research community and those operating in the management community and (2) other factors external to the collaborative process and organization.     

Collectively engaging complex socio-ecological systems: re-envisioning science, governance, and the California Delta

We address the future of science and governance for the California Delta, focusing on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program, an interagency, multi-stakeholder effort to understand and manage the Delta for multiple purposes. We portray a Delta history as a coevolutionary process between science, governance and ecosystems. Global integrated environmental assessments (IEA) provide insights into understanding complex, dynamic socio-ecological systems. Many of the discursive stakeholder and scientific activities that have arisen under CALFED are similar to IEA and remain essential to the shared learning needed to effectively interact with a dynamic Delta. More deliberately enmeshing environmental monitoring, analysis, and collective learning into Delta governance will improve outcomes.     

Ingredients in sustainably managing water in semi-arid environments

The lessons learned from CALFED indicate that ingredients important in the long-term resolution of water management issues may not result in short-term “solutions”. The value of this special issue lies in its identification of ingredients that stimulate re-framing of issues, adapting to new knowledge and innovative decisions. But sustainable water management also requires the political patience to sustain those processes as a means of perpetuating the long-term decision-making necessary to anticipate and/or respond to an ever-changing environment.     

CALFED and the quest for optimal institutional fragmentation

Environmental problems are typically addressed by fragmented governance institutions. Fragmentation can present serious barriers to resolving environmental conflicts, but can also offer benefits. The CALFED experience should not be seen as demonstrating that unified governance is necessarily superior. Rather, it is a reminder that a fragmented governance strategy is not likely to succeed without strong leadership and tools for resolving inter-agency conflicts.     

Environmental principles applicable to supply chains design and operation

In this paper we deal with the problem of identifying environmental principles for the design and operation of supply chains. The operations that are included in supply chains are briefly described along with the approaches that are applied in order to improve their environmental performance. A background of environmental principles for achieving eco-efficiency and building of environmentally friendly organizational systems is presented and emphasis is put on the application of such principles “from cradle to grave”. Then, environmental principles applicable to particular objects of logistics networks planning are identified and commented upon. In addition, selective case studies from the literature, which show the applicability of the formulated principles and their relevance to practice, are discussed. The paper concludes with some remarks regarding the benefits for companies and societies, in general, that occur as a result of the application of the formulated principles.     

Collaborative governance and adaptive management: Lessons from California's CALFED Water Program

Both for its technological and institutional innovations and for its history of conflicts, California's water system has been one of the most observed in the world. This article and this Special Issue on the CALFED Bay-Delta Program continue in this tradition. CALFED is likely the most ambitious experiment in collaborative environmental policy and adaptive management the world has seen to date. This Issue moves beyond the celebratory tone of other analyses of collaborative, adaptive management and looks closer into how collaborative networks work to produce innovation, and more importantly to reflect also on their inherent contradictions, limitations and “dark sides”. While collaborative governance enhances mutual understandings and can be a source of innovation, it appears ill-suited to resolve alone the distributive dilemmas at the core of many water – and other environmental – conflicts. A lacuna in existing research concerns the institutional design of effective boundaries and linkages between democratic politics, legitimate authority, and adaptive governance, i.e. the mix of institutions that can provide sufficient responsibility, accountability and democratic legitimacy, without choking off the self-organizing interaction, shared learning, and communication that is at the heart of collaboration. A painful realization in the Delta is that environmental conservation and further growth may be fundamentally at odds; efficient win–win solutions, institutional or technological, seem insufficient to satisfy the competing demands posed upon the system. Radical decisions and changes might be necessary, but they seem unlikely under current institutional arrangements and political conditions.     

Understanding the North–South knowledge divide and its implications for policy: a quantitative analysis of the generation of scientific knowledge in the environmental sciences

The paper investigates the scientific knowledge divide in the environmental sciences between developed and developing countries and explores the implications and impacts on both science and policymaking. Quantitative data analysis of more than 6400 scientific papers published in 1993–2003 yield evidence for a growing divide in authorship, publication rates, and location of scientific research in nine environmental journals with high impact factor ratings. In addition to this severe imbalance in publication rates between developed and developing countries, we also find a research bias toward certain eco-climatic zones. More than 80% of papers are published in and about temperate and cold eco-climatic zones. Only 13% of the papers in our study are based on research in the dry sub-tropical and tropical zones, although these eco-climatic zones account for more than 52% of the world's land area. Based on these results, we discuss how the limited empirical source and focus of environmental research undermine the claims of universality of environmental science and what consequences this may have on policymaking processes at different levels. Finally, we briefly explore some short- and long-term strategies to address the knowledge divide.     

Environmental supply chain dynamics

This paper investigates the circumstances under which “environmental supply chain dynamics” (ESCD) emerge. ESCD are a phenomenon where environmental innovations diffuse from a customer firm to a supplier firm. Its relevance is based on the argument that systemic approaches are needed to understand the environmental implications of industrial systems, of which supply chains are a key component. Furthermore, buyer–supplier relationships play a critical role in the decision-making processes of most suppliers, which in turn has the potential to stimulate environmental change within the supply chain. Based on case studies in the British and Japanese food retail sector and the British aerospace industry, it will be shown that ESCD emerge if there is a channel leader with sufficient channel power over their suppliers, technical competencies, and are themselves under specific environmental pressure.     

Constructing risks – Internalisation of flood risks in the flood risk management plan

Traditional flood protection methods have focused efforts on different measures to keep water out of floodplains. However, the European Flood Directive challenges this paradigm (Hartmann and Driessen, 2013). Accordingly, flood risk management plans should incorporate measures brought about by collaboration with local governments to develop and implement these measures (Johann and Leismann, 2014). One of the challenges of these plans is getting and keeping stakeholders involved in the processes related to flood risk management. This research shows that that this challenge revolves around how flood risks are socially constructed.Therefore it is essential to understand and explain the risk perception of stakeholders. System Theory by Luhmann provides the analytical distinction between ‘internal risk’ and ‘external danger’ as key concepts to understand whether or not stakeholders will take action (Luhmann, 1993). While perceptions of ‘external danger’ will not lead to action, perceptions of ‘internal risk’ urge stakeholders to take action.The cases of the rivers Lippe and Emscher in the dense populated region between Duisburg and Dortmund in Germany illustrate how these theoretical concepts materialise in practice. This contribution shows how flood risks are socially constructed and how this construction is influenced by the European flood risk management plan. While clearing up some of the difficulties from the Flood Directive, the research shows a gap between the Flood Directive and the current theory and planning practice, which needs to be addressed in further research.     

Misdefining “climate change”: consequences for science and action

The restricted definition of “climate change” used by the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) has profoundly affected the science, politics, and policy processes associated with the international response to the climate issue. Specifically, the FCCC definition has contributed to the gridlock and ineffectiveness of the global response to the challenge of climate change. This paper argues that the consequences of misdefining “climate change” create a bias against adaptation policies and set the stage for the politicization of climate science. The paper discusses options for bringing science, policy and politics in line with a more appropriate definition of climate change such as the more comprehensive perspective used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.     

Legal constraints, environmental variability, and the limits of innovative environmental governance

Using CALFED as a case study, this article explores problems with a conventional conceptual framework for understanding environmental crises. That framework, which both derives from and influences legal regimes, posits that environmental managers should fulfill the protective requirements of environmental laws, but should discern exactly where the brink of non-compliance lies and should allow or even facilitate resource consumption right up to that perceived edge. In contexts like CALFED, where environmental conditions are uncertain and institutions are unavoidably somewhat rigid and inflexible, that approach will function poorly, and this article therefore articulates an alternative conceptual approach capable of improving the reliability of resource allocation patterns. That alternative approach posits that in conditions of scarcity, environmental uncertainty, and rigidly constraining environmental laws, the intensity and reliability of resource use are likely to be inversely proportional, and reducing the intensity of consumptive use will tend to increase the stability and reliability of consumptive patterns.     

ECO-design of reuse and recycling networks by multi-objective optimization

An ECO-optimized reuse of process liquors addresses the financial gain and the effective use of resources. In processes that have a potential for process liquor recovery, the minimization of both economic and environmental burdens can be realised by an ECO-optimal design of reuse and recycling network (RRN).In this paper, a procedure for synthesizing such an RRN for a metal finishing process is investigated. The simultaneous analysis of environmental impact sensitivity (SAEIS) based on a superstructure approach, combined with multi-objective optimization is performed by mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP). This allows an “eco–eco” trade-off i.e. total annualized cost and environmental impacts are minimized simultaneously. By varying the weighting factor, different RRN alternatives were generated. A replacement of the standard and closed-loop system by these solutions, even for the environmentally friendliest case, yielded a reasonable cost saving on raw material's inputs.     

我国实施合同环境服务政策的思考

首先介绍了国外实施自愿性环境协议的基本情况与我国实施自愿性能源合同管理的主要经验。在此基础上,论述了我国实施合同环境服务政策的必然性。提出:进行合同环境服务政策的政策研究与设计是实施合同环境服务政策的关键;加大财政支持力度是实施合同环境服务政策的基础;建立合同环境服务政策的运行机制,有关部门与行业协会的作用,是实施合同环境服务政策的保证。     

How to be a more effective environmental scientist in management and policy contexts

This paper is intended for young researchers with an environmental conscience, alerting them that a self-centred ecology can work against conservation and other desirable goals. I propose that there is confusion in the biophysical ecologists’ community about the role of knowledge, stemming from several already surpassed beliefs that have been strongly criticized by scholars in the field of science and technology studies. In particular, environmental scientists still often seem trapped in the information deficit model, assuming a linear and unidirectional flow of knowledge from experts to users. This leads to an incomplete understanding and unrealistic expectations of ongoing processes of citizen participation (co-production of knowledge), impatience regarding the speed at which issues can be dealt with by politics, and a fuzzy notion of the role of our convictions regarding the value of nature conservation when we are consulted as experts. I analyse the consequences of disregarding tacit knowledge, i.e. the one knowledge beyond that codified in academic papers and books. I emphasize that preferences and values have a large influence on how we perceive, process, and act (or postpone to act) on information on our non-exclusive roles as scientists, decision makers or citizens. I argue that this is why political and ideological preferences have a large influence not only on which teams are appointed to solve problems, but also on which situations are perceived as problematic and given higher priorities. I include a cheat-sheet to enhance communication with decision-makers and other non-scientists that could prevent environmental zeal to be transformed into society’s annoyance and our eventual irrelevance. I plea for a more realistic attitude towards ecological research, highlighting that in environmental debates we are also long-term stakeholders, and not only casual, external and aseptic observers.     

A comparative analysis between composite indexes of environmental performance: An analysis on the CIEP and EPI

The measurement of environmental impact through composite indexes provides information about the effects of human activities on the ecosystem. Over recent years proposals regarding the environmental composite indexes (ECI) have emerged, suggesting that they can be used to help in decisions about public policies. Due the number of these indicators, issues arise about the asymmetry of information provided, although all ECI seek to measure ecosystem quality or damage. The present paper compares the Composite Index of Environmental Performance (CIEP) (García-Sánchez et al., 2015) and the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) (Hsu et al., 2014) in order to find convergent and divergent characteristics, studying methodological aspects and empirical evidence through statistical analysis, in order to favour the decision-making by stakeholders and to improve the existing ECI in order to determine adequately the environmental impact. The results show that the indexes were developed using different methods and variables, however, they share around 20% identical variables. Despite these differences, the rate of variation in ranking countries between the indexes is 21%, on average. The EPI policy category ‘water & sanitation (effects on humans)’ has two common variables and explains part of the CIEP performance. The effect dimension of the CIEP has one more identical variable and it reduces the individual variation between rank positions.     

Better regulation by new governance hybrids? Governance models and the reform of European chemicals policy

The EU is presently in a transition phase from environmental policy-making by law towards other governance approaches based upon networking, voluntary commitments, benchmarking and other forms of “soft law”. Those new governance approaches often claim to lead to “better regulation”, while adopting a more consensus-oriented and participatory style, taking economic aspects more seriously into account, allowing for more flexibility and autonomy for the private sector and Member States alike, mobilising a broader knowledge base or adopting more integrated and holistic approaches than previous sectoralised and compartmentalised policies.While the limitations of traditional regulatory approaches are widely accepted and cited, it is far from evident, that “new modes of governance” have greater capacity to solve problems than the old ones. There is an argument, that “better regulation” might by synonymous to a withdrawal and weakening of the regulatory state and hence effectively of the aspirations and objectives of environmental policies.An interesting case for an approach, combining the strengths of the old and the new approaches is the ongoing reform of chemicals policies. While some observers claim, that the proposed directive, “REACH” might belong to the outdated category of overcomplex and bureaucratic regulation, a closer look shows that there are many new forms of governance in REACH. This mixture or old and new may open a more realistic and promising perspective on the reform of European policy-making.In our paper we assess the effects and the interplay of the combination of different modes of governance using the example of REACH. We are particularly concerned with the question in how far the representation of interests may change when new modes of governance are introduced.     

Stakeholders and environmental management systems: a synergistic influence on environmental imbalance

This article analyzes the combined effects of stakeholder pressure and the implementation of environmental management systems on organizations’ environmental behaviors. Beyond their individual effects, the implementation of an environmental management system should enhance the effect of stakeholder pressure on environmental imbalance, defined as the divergence between what the organization does and what it should do. Information collected from 3748 industrial plants in seven countries provides empirical evidence that supports the study propositions. Therefore, this study contributes to both the debate about the effectiveness of environmental management systems and the effort to explain the complex relationship between organizations and their stakeholders in environmental matters.