Renegotiating nature in the Anthropocene: Australia’s environment movement in a time of crisis

The Anthropocene raises two interrelated problems for the Australian environment movement. The first concerns the movement’s normative and political relationship to non-human nature: climate change in particular is forcing an urgent reconsideration of how nature is to be understood and managed. The second problem concerns the implications of full recognition of the rights of First Peoples for environmental justice. These issues may lead to crises of identity, legitimacy, and effectiveness for the Australian movement. The normative bases upon which Australian environmentalists may draw in order to ‘protect nature’ in the Anthropocene are discussed. Setting aside the simple emancipatory ambition of preservationist environmentalism and the Australian movement’s earlier Romantic protectionism, a new pragmatic, pluralistic environmental politics – based on precaution, the avoidance of pain and suffering, and protection of the most vulnerable – is suggested.     

The legacy of lead pollution: (dis)trust in science and the debate over Superfund

Lead contamination is a significant health hazard in communities around the world, but this environmental toxin often remains unknown to residents living near hazardous sites. This research investigates a unique case where residents were informed of lead contamination but rejected official and scientific narratives regarding environmental risks. The case study involves a decommissioned smelter in Colorado. Drawing from data collected over three years, the researchers examine how officials and experts communicated the severity of environmental health hazards. Despite these efforts, residents opposed the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to place the site on the National Priorities List for federal cleanup. The government’s framing of science and environmental risk failed to resonate with homeowners, despite the known and significant scientific evidence confirming environmental health hazards, and residents’ perceptions of lead contamination were mitigated by material concerns, including property values and community stigma. Implications for future research on lead contamination, environmental risk, and trust in science are discussed.     

Support for environmental protection: an integration of ideological-consistency and information-deficit models

The divergent roles of education in predicting environmental support among liberals, conservatives, and moderates in the United States are explained by integrating ideological-consistency and information-deficit models. Increased political polarization among elites has led to divergent environmental positions advocated by liberal and conservative political and media leaders; it was predicted that education would increase public attention to these elite cues and, consistent with the ideological-consistency model, increased education would lead to attitudes in line with consensual positions endorsed by party elites. Across two nationally representative data sets, higher levels of education were associated with stronger environmental support among liberals and weaker environmental support among conservatives. Moderates were predicted to have fewer elite cues on which to base their attitudes; consistent with the information-deficit model, higher levels of education among moderates were associated with strengthened environmental support. A moderated-mediation model supported the differential application of these two theories.     

The effects of the Fukushima disaster on nuclear energy debates and policies: a two-step comparative examination

Under what conditions do critical events trigger large-scale public discussion and mobilisation, and can these lead to policy change? In a comparative study of nuclear energy policy after the Japanese Fukushima disaster in March 2011, a theory-development approach is adopted, mobilising data collected from national news agencies’ newswires, public surveys, legislation and parliamentary databases, and newspaper editorials in 12 established democracies between March 2011 and March 2013. The analysis suggests two main hypotheses that can guide future research: critical events are more likely to trigger policy change when intense (contentious) mobilisation from policy challengers aligns with the views of the general public, and is backed by major political allies; and critical events are more likely to trigger intense (contentious) mobilisation when policy challengers articulate their opposition around pre-existing policy debates on the issue and resort to pre-existing organisational and mobilisation resources.     

States,coalitions, and the legalization of the global climate regime: negotiations on the post-2020 architecture

Why do some states and state coalitions, acting within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), support harder legalization of the global climate regime? In order to explain why, the effects of four causal factors are considered: climate vulnerability, the emission intensity of the national economy, a state’s power position, and socialization into climate norms. To identify the legalization positions of UNFCCC actors, an original content analysis is conducted of all the submission and meeting statements made at the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform during the years 2012–2015. Subsequently, a qualitative comparative analysis is carried out to find out which combinations of the causal factors offer a sufficient explanation for the analyzed outcome, leading to the identification of two causal pathways that lead states to endorse harder legalization of the climate regime.     

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.     

Effective advocacy: the psychological mechanisms of environmental issue framing

ABSTRACT

While environmental issues are among the most serious threats to human security, they tend to rank toward the bottom of Americans’ priorities for political action. To redress this, environmental organizations strategically frame their mobilization communications in an attempt to garner the public’s support. Advocacy research groups encourage the use of motivational, economic and personal frames because of their ability to mobilize support through distinct psychological processes: efficacy, psychological proximity and emotion. An experimental study is conducted that tests the extent to which these mechanisms mediate environmental frames’ effects on support for an environmental campaign. Results of this study lead to the conclusion that motivational frames are unable to elicit efficacy in the target audience, thus proving ineffectual at influencing attitudes or behaviors. Economic and personal frames are more successful, aligning the audience’s attitudes with the message and operating through psychological proximity, sadness and anger to induce behavioral support for the environmental campaign.     

The discovery of ash dieback in the UK: the making of a focusing event

Why did the identification of ash dieback (Chalara Fraxinea) in 2012 in the UK catch the national media, public, and political zeitgeist, and lead to policy changes, in a way that no other contemporary tree pest or pathogen outbreak has? The identification of ash dieback in the UK is conceptualised as a successful ‘focusing event’, and the ways in which it was socially constructed by the media, stakeholders, and the government are analysed. National newspaper coverage contributed to the way that the disease was understood and was significant in driving the political response. Ash dieback’s focal power derived from the perceived scale and nature of its impact, the initial attribution of blame on government, the war-like response from the government, and Ash’s status as a threatened native tree. The ash dieback focusing event has increased the salience of plant health issues amongst policymakers, the public, and conservation organisations in the UK.     

The externality of a mortality incident within an apartment building: cases of homicide,suicide and fire deaths

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - The presence of a stigmatized property due to undesirable mortality incidents, such as homicide and suicide, may affect people’s willingness to...     

Who shapes local climate policy? Unpicking governance arrangements in English and German cities

A new framework for analysing subnational policymaking is applied to climate governance in the ‘twin towns’ of Newcastle upon Tyne and Gelsenkirchen. Low levels of resource interdependence between central and local government in England mean that Newcastle Council has to rely heavily on other horizontal actors to achieve its climate objectives. In contrast, Gelsenkirchen Council receives substantial support from higher tiers of government, which gives it greater control over policymaking within the locality. Greater independence between tiers of government can make it more difficult for subnational bodies to adopt the kind of ambitious policies that may be necessary to combat wicked and/or significant policy challenges such as climate change. Instead, interdependent ‘joint-decision’ systems, which facilitate mutual support across tiers of government, may be better equipped to ensure that subnational public bodies have the capacity to act appropriately.     

Boomerangs versus Javelins: How Polarization Constrains Communication on Climate Change

Political communicators work under the assumption that information provision, such as framing, may influence audiences and elicit some desired attitudinal or behavioral shift. However, some political issues, such as climate change, have become polarized along party lines, with partisans seemingly impervious to disconfirming information. On these highly polarized issues, can framing sway partisans to moderate their positions, or are partisans so motivated in their issue stances that framing fails? Using a variety of vignettes, and Republican climate change skepticism as a case, this article reports an experiment of how partisans respond to counter-attitudinal framing on a sharply polarized issue. Results indicate that Republicans are resistant to frames that encourage support of governmental action or personal engagement against climate change. There is strong evidence of motivated skepticism, given widespread backfire (or ‘boomerang’) effects and decreased attitudinal ambivalence following exposure to framing, suggesting that issue polarization may severely constrain attempts at communication.     

Optimizing contract allocation for risky conservation tenders

In the face of a shrinking budget for environmental activities, conservation agencies must design and implement agri-environmental policies that cost-effectively meet the environmental objectives. However, designing such programs is often challenging due to different uncertainties. For example, landholders may be exposed to risks when carrying out conservation projects. To minimise the negative impact of unexpected losses, landholders may require additional financial incentives as compensation for undertaking “risky” conservation projects. In such situations, the conservation agency risks over-spending public funds because of prohibitively high opportunity costs from landholders or failing to meet the environmental target. We used analytical and simulation approaches to explore optimal budget allocation in a target-constrained conservation tender. We also compared the performance of the tender with and without own-cost uncertainty. Results showed that as landholders’ own-cost uncertainty rises, the conservation agency is forced to allocate more funding to secure the same level of the environmental target. We found that the optimal funding level is sensitive to landholders’ competition uncertainty and the magnitude of expected losses.

     

Deliberative democracy meets democratised science: a deliberative systems approach to global environmental governance

The main achievements of the debates on deliberative democracy and democratised science are investigated in order to analyse the reasons, meanings and prospects for a democratisation of global environmental policy. A deliberative systems approach, which emphasises the need to explore how processes in societal spheres interact to shape the deliberative qualities of the system as a whole, is adopted. Although science plays a key role in this, its potential to enhance deliberative capacity has hardly been addressed in deliberative theories. The democratisation of science has potential to contribute to the democratisation of global environmental policy, in that it also shapes the potential of deliberative arrangements in the policy sphere. Deliberative arrangements within the policy sphere may stimulate the democratisation of science to different degrees.     

Environmental SLAPPs in the UK: threat or opportunity?

Strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) brought against the environmental movement in the UK since the 1990s are examined. SLAPPs, a form of Green backlash, have been mobilised across a wide range of policy areas that have seen vigorous campaigning and protest by the movement, including roads, GMOs and, more recently, climate change. SLAPPs are typically regarded as a threat, designed to close down democratic free speech and protest. However, in the UK, there are some notable cases where the environmental movement has been able to use agency to convert what may appear as a legal threat into a positive legal or media opportunity.     

Do global climate summits influence public awareness and policy preferences concerning climate change?

A survey-embedded experiment implemented around the time of the 2014 annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (N ≈ 1200) examined whether such summits are able to increase citizens’ awareness of climate problems. This study finds that exposure to positive or negative cues about the COP increases climate change awareness, particularly among participants who start out with a low level of awareness. Neither positive nor negative cues about the COP significantly affect people’s policy preferences. Our finding resonates with Bernard Cohen’s observation that the mass media may not often be successful in telling people what to think, but they are successful in telling readers what to think about.     

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.     

Framing trans-border energy transportation: the case of Keystone XL

Increasing discussion over the safety of natural resource extraction and transportation to facilitate international energy needs has given rise to controversy over the prospect of large quantities of bitumen and crude oil flowing through trans-national pipelines. This debate, incorporating the voices of industry, government and advocacy groups, has gained traction in the news media, alternately framed as an environmental, economic, trade, human rights or public safety concern. It is possible, however, that such coverage may vary substantially with regional interests and perceptions of costs and benefits, locally or nationally. To uncover how the framing of energy transportation varies with proximity considerations, regional and national media coverage in Canada and the United States of the Keystone XL pipeline from 2010 to 2014 is analyzed. National and local papers frame the pipeline according to different considerations, as do cities near to and distant from the pipeline route.     

Assessing diversity and inclusivity within the Transition movement: an urban case study

The Transition movement has experienced remarkable growth in its first decade, yet there remains considerable doubt about its ability to appeal to a diverse audience. To date, few studies have explicitly examined diversity of participation in the movement. Addressing this gap in the literature, a case study is presented of Transition Town Tooting (TTT). Results from a mixed methods approach comprising semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and a quantitative survey indicate that the demographic profiles of TTT participants do not represent the diversity of the Tooting population. This disparity is exacerbated by TTT’s ‘passive’ approach to inclusivity within the core group. Reflecting upon the implications for Transition’s goal of local resilience, it is suggested that, particularly within dense urban communities, initiatives may have more potential for engaging diverse voices through a local ‘brokering’ role between various subcommunities.     

Governance experiments in climate action: empirical findings from the 28 European Union countries

Climate targets call for novel policy measures to facilitate widespread adoption of low-carbon solutions and innovations. The literature on socio-technical systems argues that experimentation has a prominent role in enabling sustainability transition. Experiments represent ways of testing new ideas and methods across a wide range of policy fields. Governance experiments in particular can support accelerated diffusion of new solutions, because they integrate policy with innovations. Here, types of success factors in the implementation of governance experiments to mitigate climate change are examined. Statistical analysis of sustainability innovations in the 28 European Union countries indicates that the types of success factors in governance experiments differ from those of product and social experiments. Governance experimentation is more positioned within socio-technical regimes than in strategic niches. These results suggest that governance experiments may indeed provide new transition opportunities towards low-carbon societies.     

Climate pushers or symbolic leaders? The limits to corporate climate leadership by food retailers

ABSTRACT

Corporate climate leadership and its relationship with state regulations are discussed. First, a typology defining corporate climate leadership is introduced and distinguished from the other strategic behaviours corporations may adopt in response to climate change. A conceptual framework to explore the mechanisms enabling corporate climate leadership within a given policy system is then presented. This framework is applied to two big Swiss food retailers, considered as typical of corporate climate leaders, firms that showed an early interest in climate protection, as a result of ecological values, third actors’ lobbying and particular market incentives. Most importantly, the two companies were set in motion by a regulatory framework that featured stringent policy goals associated with flexible instruments and economic sanctions. The importance of these findings for understanding the role of corporate leadership in polycentric climate governance is discussed.