Emergency and institutional crisis in Peru during El Nino 1982-1983

From December 1982 through July 1983, Peru was plagued by disastrous consequences of El Nino/Southern Oscillation phenomenon. While the northern part of the country was devastated by torrential rains and floods, central Andean Peru endured landslides and flash floods, the southern Altiplano suffered a severe drought. Hazard preparedness was nonexistent, and official disaster relief uncoordinated and slow in coming. Administrative inefficiency magnified the stress upon the populations under disaster conditions. Provisions of disaster training from specialized international organizations is recommended as a preventive measure and as a policy to improve catastrophe-coping abilities in developing nations.     

Culture and the environment in the United States

The beliefs of Americans about the proper relationship between humans and their environment were profoundly affected by waves of immigration from Europe. Immigrants valued ownership of land, individuality, freedom, domination of nature, and technological development. These themes remain strong today as centerpieces of the American dominant social paradigm (DSP).That DSP has been reexamined and found wanting by an increasing proportion of Americans. This departure from the old DSP has progressed further among the public than among the elite who have a greater stake in preserving the status quo. Environmentalists constitute a vanguard trying to lead the people to a new, more environmentally oriented social paradigm. The beliefs of the old DSP and the new environmental paradigm (NEP) are contrasted in Table 2. Briefly, the NEP advocates stress love of nature rather than domination of it; compassion for other peoples, future generations, and other species; planning to avoid risk; limits to growth; fundamental social change; and a new structuring of politics.These two worldviews are likely to be in vigorous conflict for several decades in the USA. Social learning, spurred by deterioration of the old ways, is likely to lead Americans to a new perspective on their relationship to nature.With the advice and assistance of Barbara V. Fisher.     

Evaluating the effects of local floodplain management policies on property owner behavior

Floodplain management programs have been adopted by more than 85% of local governments in the nation with designated flood hazard areas. Yet, there has been little evaluation of the influence of floodplain policies on private sector decisions. This article examines the degree to which riverine floodplain management affects purchase and mitigation decisions made by owners of developed floodplain property in ten selected cities in the United States. We find that the stringency of such policies does not lessen floodplain property buying because of the overriding importance of site amenity factors. Indeed, flood protection measures incorporated into development projects appear to add to the attractiveness of floodplain location by increasing the perceived safety from the hazard. Property owner responses to the flood hazard after occupancy involve political action more often than individual on-site mitigation. Floodplain programs only minimally encourage on-site mitigation by the owner because most owners have not experienced a flood and many are unaware of the flood threat. It is suggested that floodplain programs will be more effective in meeting their objectives if they are directed at intervention points earlier in the land conversion process.     

Political commitment to CO<Subscript>2</Subscript> capture and storage: evidence from government RD&;D budgets

For CO₂ capture and storage (CCS) to succeed as a mitigation strategy, political commitment is one of several prerequisites. This article offers an appraisal of political commitment to a CCS strategy among high-income countries in Europe and North America: Which governments are committed, and what particular interests and concerns do they seek to accommodate by supporting CCS? In order to answer these questions, new data are reported on government CCS research, development and demonstration (RD&;D) budgets. RD&;D budgets divided by GDP is used as an indicator of political commitment, and explanations are sought for cross-national differences. The analysis shows that fossil fuels reserves and extraction within a country has a very strong bearing on funding levels. Likely explanations include the potential for combining CCS with enhanced resource recovery. All large economies (population >50 million) have a funding program. The smaller states that provide funding (Norway, Canada, the Netherlands) have the highest funding levels relative to GDP. These findings suggest that high-income petroleum producing countries are likely to be leaders in promoting CCS and a favorable regulatory environment. The fact that all large, high-income countries in the two regions now display some interest in CCS further improves its political outlook.     

Mechanisms to exclude local people from forests: Shifting power relations in forest transitions

Forest transitions may significantly contribute to climate change mitigation but also change forest use, affecting the local people benefiting from forests. We analyze forest transitions as contested processes that simplify multifunctional landscapes and alter local livelihoods. Drawing on the Theory of Access, we develop a conceptual framework to investigate practices of multifunctional forest use and the mechanisms that exclude local forest use(r)s during forest transitions in nineteenth century Austria and twenty-first century Lao PDR. Based on historical sources, interviews and secondary literature, we discuss legal, structural and social-metabolic mechanisms to exclude multifunctional forest practices, marginalizing peasants and shifting cultivators. These include, for example, the increasing enforcement of private ownership in forests or the shift from fuelwood to coal in Austria and restrictive land use planning or the expansion of private land concessions in Laos. By integrating political ecology and environmental history in forest transitions research we unravel shifting power relations connected to forest change.     

Transitional politics: emerging incentive-based instruments in environmental regulation

This paper proposes a positive theory of environmental instrument choice. We study a democratic society that seeks to lower the level of pollution from industrial sources to a pre-specified target. The target can be implemented by one of three instruments: [S]: uniform emission standards; [P]: tradeable permits; and [T]: emission taxes. The conflict of interest between special-interests, representing polluters, and the electorate is resolved by an elected politician. We characterize when each of the three policy instruments is chosen in political equilibrium and show that the transition, observed in many countries, from [S] to either [P] or [T] can be understood as a natural consequence of increasingly ambitious environmental targets.     

Trade liberalization, corruption, and environmental policy formation: theory and evidence

This study explores the linkages between trade policy, corruption, and environmental policy. We begin by presenting a theoretical model that produces several testable predictions, including: (i) the effect of trade liberalization on the stringency of environmental policy depends on the level of corruption; and (ii) corruption reduces environmental policy stringency. Using panel data from a mix of developed and developing countries from 1982 to 1992, we find evidence that supports these conjectures. We view these results as representing an attempt at understanding the myriad of complex relationships that exist in an open economy.     

Loyal rebels? A test of the normative conflict model of constructive deviance

Constructive deviance is a voluntary behavior that violates organizational rules but is conducted with honorable intentions to benefit the organization or its stakeholders. Despite emerging interest in this behavior, the antecedents of constructive deviance remain unclear, with particular ambiguity concerning the relationship between organizational identity and constructive deviance. In this article, we address this ambiguity with the normative conflict model, which posits that organizational identity drives constructive deviance in the workplace only when people perceive normative conflict with organizational rules. In Studies 1a and 1b, we develop and validate a measure of normative conflict. In Study 2, we conduct a preliminary test of the model with employed students and find that identity is positively related to constructive deviance only when normative conflict is high. In Study 3, we replicate and extend the model to show that the moderating effect of normative conflict is mediated by experienced psychological discomfort and that organizational identity is positively related to constructive deviance among working adults only when discomfort is high. In total, our findings demonstrate the utility of the normative conflict model for explaining when constructive deviance is mostly likely to occur in the workplace.     

Assessing the susceptibility of societies to droughts: a political science perspective

In this article we develop a concept for the assessment of state’s susceptibility to drought based on a political science perspective. Different sources of capacities and sensitivities need to be taken into account to assess the overall susceptibility of states as political systems. We argue that the overall susceptibility of a society depends on an interplay of state capacity and readiness as main elements of political susceptibility, wealth and economic sensitivity as elements of economic susceptibility and the degree of social integration. To transform the conceptual model into a susceptibility assessment we developed an inference model in order to generate quantitative indices. For this purpose we apply fuzzy set theory using data from our case study regions, namely Andhra Pradesh (India), the Volga region (Russia) and (Southern) Portugal. The resulting computed trends for Portugal suggest that the society will be able to deal even with severe natural conditions due to existing political, economic, and social conditions. The assessment results for the Indian and Russian case study regions, in contrast, give reason for precaution since the occurrence of drought-induced crisis events seems much more likely in the light of more crucial, overall conditions, namely lower degrees of state capacity and readiness as well as, in the case of India, a high economic susceptibility. However, further improvements are possible given the improved availability of data and the integration of more qualitative information. Additionally, the expansion to further case study regions could help validate the overall concept.     

Path Dependencies and Path Change in Complex Fields of Action: Climate Adaptation Policies in Germany in the Realm of Flood Risk Management

The spatial and temporal repercussions of climate change are of an extremely complex nature. Coping with climate change is, first and foremost, a challenge to political decision making and, considering the long-term effects of the climate system, to planning. However, there have never been more doubts that the political-administrative system is able to meet these requirements. Although much evidence has been put forward in favor of such skepticism, sometimes, it is dangerous to overstate the existing limits. Drawing on two case studies in the area of flood risk management in Germany, the article illustrates how and why significant path change came about. In both cases, the state proved to still being a pivotal actor, due to a number of functions that cannot be assumed by other actors. However, other actor groups—such as actors from science, the media, NGOs, and citizen groups—play a significant role as well by providing relevant expertise and influencing the public discourse, thus mobilizing significant political pressure.