Total employee involvement: Measures for success

Whether environmental management is successful depends partly on whether managers can actively involve employees in policy formulation and implementation. This not only generates shop floor support for environmental policy, it also makes use of employees' environmental knowledge and expertise. Based on eight detailed case studies of different Dutch companies, this article examines the involvement of employees in environmental management and the possibilities of enhancing this involvement. It shows how employee involvement can be promoted by improving employeemanagement interaction, promoting responsibility for the environment among middle management and individual employees, formulating supplementary policy, and introducing a number of concrete measures.     

Herbizide im Spannungsfeld zwischen Ökologie und Ökonomie

The Science of Nature - Effective weed control has always been one of the central problems in agriculture. With the increase in the size of farm units and the drop in the number of workers,...     

The rise and fall of new knowledge interests in the Dutch environmental movement

Summary Since the late 1960s concern about the pollution of our physical environment has grown into a social and political issue. In this process of increasing awareness, environmental activists have played a catalysing role in most Western countries. Moreover the environmentalists formulated an alternative set of ideas and strategies concerning the production and use of knowledge. These new knowledge interests were organised around three dimensions: cosmology, technology, and the organisation of knowledge production. On the basis of a case-study of Dutch environmentalism this paper tries to demonstrate how the articulation of these new knowledge interests of international scope actually occurred in the particular Dutch national setting. The analysis shows that many of the ideas brought forward in the course of time by Dutch environmentalists have been imported from abroad, especially from the United States, Great Britain and West Germany. However, the specific ways in which Dutch environmentalists have defined the content of their own knowledge interests have depended very much on the particularities of the political culture and socio-economic climate of the Netherlands, as well as the internal dynamics within the various environmental groups themselves.Dr Jacqueline Cramer was until very recently a member of staff in the Department of Science Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam. She has now moved to the TNO Centre for Technology and Policy Studies, P.O. Box 541, 7300 AM, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. This paper forms part of a comparative study of the development of environmentalism in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands carried out in association with Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison of the University of Lund, Sweden.)     

A spatially explicit and quantitative vulnerability assessment of ecosystem service change in Europe

Environmental change alters ecosystem functioning and may put the provision of services to human at risk. This paper presents a spatially explicit and quantitative assessment of the corresponding vulnerability for Europe, using a new framework designed to answer multidisciplinary policy relevant questions about the vulnerability of the human-environment system to global change. Scenarios were constructed for a range of possible changes in socio-economic trends, land uses and climate. These scenarios were used as inputs in a range of ecosystem models in order to assess the response of ecosystem function as well as the changes in the services they provide. The framework was used to relate the impacts of changing ecosystem service provision for four sectors in relation to each other, and to combine them with a simple, but generic index for societal adaptive capacity. By allowing analysis of different sectors, regions and development pathways, the vulnerability assessment provides a basis for discussion between stakeholders and policymakers about sustainable management of Europe’s natural resources. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A new approach to propellant formulation: minimizing life-cycle costs through science-based design

The traditional approach to developing propellants for specific gun applications relies heavily on trial and error. Candidate formulations must be made in small quantities and subjected to burning-rate measurements and small-scale vulnerability assessments. If the properties of these candidates fail to meet expectations, the process must be repeated. This approach, while historically unavoidable, is obviously inefficient in time and expense, but it also can generate considerable waste streams associated with unsuccessful formulations. With added considerations of life-cycle costs including environmental impact at all stages of development, use, and disposal, this traditional approach becomes increasingly unworkable. In this report a new approach is proposed which makes maximal use of scientific understanding embodied in models during the early phases of the propellant-development cycle. Through simple simulations, it is shown that this strategy can have a significant impact on the overall costs of the development process. In analogy to the DOE program to convert the nuclear-weapon stewardship from testing-based to science-based, we term the new approach "science-based design." It is argued that the modeling contribution to the propellant-development process is most efficiently implemented by subjecting candidate formulations to a hierarchy of models of different sophistication and input-data requirements, reserving the most rigorous models (usually the most data-intensive and least robust) for the most promising candidates. This new approach will require concentration and leveraging of resources toward the most critical early-phase development steps, but it may be the only credible strategy to reconcile the need for higher-performance weapons with the reality of declining resources.