Regulation of aquaculture production

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - In this paper, we investigate the economically optimal regulation of aquaculture production. The time between releasing and harvesting fish (rotation...     

The territorialization of transnational sustainability governance: production,power and globalization in Iceland’s fisheries

To contribute to the literature on transnational sustainability governance hybrids, a new fisheries certification program in Iceland that was originally developed as an alternative to the non-governmental Marine Stewardship Council is examined. While this new program appears on the surface to constitute a purely nationalistic reaction against external non-state authority, the new governance institution is also non-governmental and incorporates international norms and institutions. To explain this new governance hybrid, Robert Cox’s International Political Economy approach to production and power is engaged. This approach theorizes the co-constitution of the social forces of production, state–society complexes and global governance. It is argued that the Icelandic case is not entirely localized or unique; it is part of a broader movement in which social forces of production respond to new market-oriented transnational sustainability governance institutions by developing territorially embedded but transnationally legitimate alternatives.     

Risk preference,trust, and willingness-to-accept subsidies for pro-environmental production: an investigation of hog farmers in China

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - The objectives of this study are to investigate Chinese hog farmers’ minimum willingness-to-accept (WTA) subsidies for complying pro-environmental...     

Sincerity as Strategy: Green Movements and the Problem of Reconciling Deliberative and Instrumental Action

ABSTRACT

Social movements seek to influence views on environmental issues and put pressure on policy-makers in a range of related areas. But alongside their specific goals, they also often strive to create space for genuine deliberation about the need for societal transformation. This ‘dual orientation’ places them theoretically between social movement studies’ focus on strategic considerations and the ‘sincere’ (truthful) communication envisioned by democratic theorists to be a condition for ‘authentic’ deliberation, in which actors genuinely seek to understand each other’s views. Engaging with both fields of theory, a framework is developed for separating actions that are strategic, sincere and employ sincerity as strategy. Actors choose sincerity as a strategy when they practice truthful reasoning as a means to advance their interests in the public sphere. As illustrated by green movements, the concept captures how activists may handle three risks in public discourse: commercialization, politicization and idealization.     

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.     

Right-wing populism and the climate change agenda: exploring the linkages

The rise of right-wing populism (RWP) poses a challenge for the climate agenda, as leaders and supporters tend to be climate sceptics and hostile to policy prescribing action on climate change. However, there is a surprising dearth of research that investigates the nature and causes of this association. Two kinds of explanation are considered, drawing on the literature on populism. One is termed ‘structuralist’, drawing on accounts of the roots of populism in economic and political marginalisation amongst those ‘left behind’ by globalisation and technological change. A second focuses on the ideological content of RWP, especially its antagonism between ‘the people’ and a cosmopolitan elite, with climate change and policy occupying a symbolic place in this contrast. It is argued that there are limits to the structuralist approach, and that an ideologically based explanation is more compelling. An agenda for future research on RWP and climate science and policy is proposed.     

Ecological citizenship and democracy: Communitarian versus agonistic perspectives

Grassroots environmental movements have recently started to question the focus on sustainable consumption as a main strategy to tackle climate change. They prefer to address individuals as citizens rather than as consumers, and focus on collective rather than individual change. Two prominent movements in this regard are Transition Towns and Climate Justice Action. While both movements criticise conventional approaches, they put forward entirely different strategies for what has to happen instead. Based on extensive qualitative research, this article analyses how these movements manifest themselves in Flanders (Belgium). The focus is on their different accounts of how and why collective practices have to be built, and the place they attribute to ‘the political’ in this. The analysis reveals the existence of two different forms of ecological citizenship: one communitarian, the other agonistic.     

Religion and environmental politics in the US House of Representatives

Does religion affect legislators’ behavior on environmental policy in the US? Studies of environmental policy making have not examined this question, although the literature suggests that religion might affect legislative behavior on environmental policy. This study examines the relationship between US House members’ religion and roll-call voting on environmental legislation from 1973 to 2009. It finds significant differences across religious traditions. Legislators’ party and characteristics of constituencies relevant to environmental politics increasingly, but not entirely, mediate these differences.     

Exploring the link between energy based taxes and economic growth

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - This paper provides empirical evidence regarding the effect of energy based taxes on economic growth. The analysis is based on a panel dataset of 31...     

Trust,political orientation,and environmental behavior

A growing body of large-N cross-national studies has identified key predictors of environmental behavior. Adopting a social dilemma perspective, where individuals must choose collective over self-interest to act pro-environmentally, integrated national datasets for 30 countries are used to examine the effects of generalized trust, trust in government, leftism, and post-materialism on three types of environmental behavior (intended action, informal action, and formal action). At the individual level, all predictors but institutional trust have significant positive effects on each type of behavior. Institutional trust is associated with greater willingness to make economic sacrifice for the environment and with less frequent informal environmental behavior, but it is unrelated to formal behavior. However, at the country level, the effect of trust is limited to intended behavior and depends on the type of trust. Individuals in countries with higher generalized trust averages are less willing to sacrifice for the environment, and those in countries with higher averages of institutional trust are more willing to do so.     

Vetoing the future: political constraints and renewable energy

Despite the increased importance of and attention to renewable energy, its share in the overall energy mix has varied significantly across countries and over time. There are many determinants of clean energy transitions; this study focuses on political constraints. Here it is argued that political systems that have fewer political constraints have fewer access points through which powerful status quo veto players can slow the progress of clean energy reforms. To test the theory, a hierarchical model is applied on a dataset of 125 countries over four decades. The results provide significant support for the theory. Furthermore, the effects for political constraints hold even when we distinguish between hydro and non-hydro renewable sources and control for regime type. This study builds on research that recognizes the importance of politics in understanding the challenges and opportunities of clean energy reform.     

Political ideology and views about climate change in the European Union

There is a strong political divide on climate change in the US general public, with Liberals and Democrats expressing greater belief in and concern about climate change than Conservatives and Republicans. Recent studies find a similar though less pronounced divide in other countries. Its leadership in international climate policy making warrants extending this line of research to the European Union (EU). The extent of a left–right ideological divide on climate change views is examined via Eurobarometer survey data on the publics of 25 EU countries before the 2008 global financial crisis, the 2009 ‘climategate’ controversy and COP-15 in Copenhagen, and an increase in organized climate change denial campaigns. Citizens on the left consistently reported stronger belief in climate change and support for action to mitigate it than did citizens on the right in 14 Western European countries. There was no such ideological divide in 11 former Communist countries, likely due to the low political salience of climate change and the differing meaning of left–right identification in these countries.     

Legitimating the environmental injustices of war: toxic exposures and media silence in Iraq and Afghanistan

During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the US Department of Defense burned the majority of its solid waste in open-air pits or trenches, producing large amounts of potentially hazardous emissions. While journalists have covered stories of US service members who link their illnesses to these fumes, they have almost entirely ignored potential civilian impacts. However, satellite images demonstrate that pollution from open-air trash burning on US bases could not have impacted US personnel without also harming Iraqi and Afghan civilians living near bases, indicating that burn-pit pollution is an important, if unacknowledged, environmental justice issue. Content analysis of news articles shows the extent to which civilian impacts have been left out of mainstream US media reporting on burn-pit pollution. This selective attention is symptomatic of the way military violence is legitimated, which involves a complicit news media that typically overlooks the humanitarian impacts of war.     

The contested politics of the Asian atom: peripheralisation and nuclear power in South Korea and Japan

South Korea and Japan have been unwaveringly committed to a nuclear-focused energy supply system despite the contested nature of that technology and the Fukushima accident in 2011. The socio-political consequences of four nuclear-related facilities (Ulju, Gyeongju, Futaba, and Rokkasho) are explored through the lens of social peripheralisation. This framework suggests that nuclear facilities will migrate to communities that are geographically remote, economically marginal, politically powerless, culturally defensive, and environmentally degraded. Nuclear infrastructures in the four cases are imposed on peripheral regions, impairing not only the structure of local economies and political power, but also creating a discriminative structure in terms of social and environmental inequality. Peripheralisation suggests a deeper dynamic by which pro-nuclear attitudes become ‘locked in’ socially and culturally so that communities come to depend on the very processes that made them peripheral. Community dynamics, subnational struggles, and contests over local power relations may determine the future of nuclear power.     

Cross-country analysis of relationship between material input structures and consumption-based CO2 emissions

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - This study focuses on the effects of changes in material and energy input structure on the consumption-based CO2 emissions. Previous studies...     

Natural resource rents and capital accumulation nexus: do resource rents raise public human and physical capital expenditures?

Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - This paper examines the effects of total, mineral, natural gas, and oil rents on the public total, education, health, and infrastructure expenditures...     

The Czech Republic’s approach to the EU 2030 climate and energy framework

ABSTRACT

The East-West divide within the EU over climate policy has been frequently discussed. There is a tendency in the literature to focus on Poland and ignore the other countries in the central and eastern European region. Here it is argued that the institutionalised cooperation between the four countries in the Visegrad Group (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) provides a crucial component for an understanding of how the participating countries approach EU climate negotiations. Here it is suggested that the group is important as a bargaining coalition but also as a reference point for the development of shared ‘Visegrad’ norms in the field. This is based on a case study of the Czech Republic’s approach to the 2014 negotiations on the 2030 climate and energy framework and the country’s cooperation with the other Visegrad countries on the issue.     

Australian Greens party members and supporters: their profiles and activities

In an era of widespread party membership decline, there is debate over the utility, within the ‘European’ tradition, of conceptualising party membership as the locus of individual party engagement, and of maintaining membership and supportership as distinct categories in analysing party activism. This debate is particularly relevant to Green parties, which, through their particular social movement origins and emphasis on grass-roots democracy, bring into question the assumption that the activities and profile of members and supporters are functionally different. Using original data gathered from two surveys of Australian Greens party members and supporters undertaken in 2012 and 2013, the political activity, associational membership, ideological position, and demographic characteristics of these two groups are compared. While active party members are distinctive in their party-specific political activities and their ideological positioning, there is much less difference between the rest of the formal party membership and the party’s active supporter base.     

Unpacking the objectives and assumptions underpinning European aquaculture

Increasing demand for seafood and the lack of growth of capture fisheries have boosted aquaculture growth worldwide. However, European aquaculture has been stagnating over the past decade, and European public authorities have been developing policies and strategies in efforts to reverse this. Aquaculture discourses in the European Union, based on 34 policy, planning, and strategy documents, are examined and a discourse analysis conducted following Bacchi’s WPR (What is the Problem Represented to be?) approach. How the problems in these discourses are represented, the tensions among main objectives, and the implicit assumptions are unveiled, and discussed employing a Polanyian theoretical framework. Taking these assumptions for granted leads to a disembedded understanding of aquaculture, and facilitates the privatization of aquatic space and resources. The analysis contributes to the literature establishing the link between the expansion of aquaculture and the enclosure of aquatic resources and enriches environmental and political debates on European aquaculture.     

Adaptation policy and community discourse: risk,vulnerability, and just transformation

How can public engagement assist in the development of just processes and outcomes in adaptation discourse and policymaking? A concern with justice is at the center of thinking about adaptation that is not only resilient, but also public, engaging, and transformative. Theoretically, the intersection of adaptation, transformation, and environmental and climate justice is examined, before exploring the specific concerns and normative foundations for adaptation policy articulated by local governments, environmental groups, and local residents engaged in adaptation planning in Australia. Despite a discursive disconnect between governmental focus on a risk or resilience-based approach and a community concern with the vulnerability of basic needs and capabilities of everyday life, deliberative engagement in adaptation planning can both address issues of justice and represent a transformative practice.