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.     

Water Management Decision Making in the Face of Multiple Forms of Uncertainty and Risk

In the Wasatch Range Metropolitan Area of Northern Utah, water management decision makers confront multiple forms of uncertainty and risk. Adapting to these uncertainties and risks is critical for maintaining the long‐term sustainability of the region's water supply. This study draws on interview data to assess the major challenges climatic and social changes pose to Utah's water future, as well as potential solutions. The study identifies the water management adaptation decision‐making space shaped by the interacting institutional, social, economic, political, and biophysical processes that enable and constrain sustainable water management. The study finds water managers and other water actors see challenges related to reallocating water, including equitable water transfers and stakeholder cooperation, addressing population growth, and locating additional water supplies, as more problematic than the challenges posed by climate change. Furthermore, there is significant disagreement between water actors over how to best adapt to both climatic and social changes. This study concludes with a discussion of the path dependencies that present challenges to adaptive water management decision making, as well as opportunities for the pursuit of a new water management paradigm based on soft‐path solutions. Such knowledge is useful for understanding the institutional and social adaptations needed for water management to successfully address future uncertainties and risks.     

Regime shifts and resilience in China’s coastal ecosystems

Regime shift often results in large, abrupt, and persistent changes in the provision of ecosystem services and can therefore have significant impacts on human wellbeing. Understanding regime shifts has profound implications for ecosystem recovery and management. China’s coastal ecosystems have experienced substantial deterioration within the past decades, at a scale and speed the world has never seen before. Yet, information about this coastal ecosystem change from a dynamics perspective is quite limited. In this review, I synthesize existing information on coastal ecosystem regime shifts in China and discuss their interactions and cascading effects. The accumulation of regime shifts in China’s coastal ecosystems suggests that the desired system resilience has been profoundly eroded, increasing the potential of abrupt shifts to undesirable states at a larger scale, especially given multiple escalating pressures. Policy and management strategies need to incorporate resilience approaches in order to cope with future challenges and avoid major losses in China’s coastal ecosystem services.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0692-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Reviving wood-pastures for biodiversity and people: A case study from western Estonia

Wood-pastures are associated with high cultural and biodiversity values in Europe. However, due to their relatively low productivity, large areas of wood-pastures have been lost over the last century. In some areas, incentive schemes have been developed to revive wood-pastures. We investigated the effects of one such scheme in western Estonia. We compared the structure of grazed wood-pastures (old and restored) to those of abandoned wood-pastures and ungrazed forest stands to explore the effects of management, and conducted interviews with 24 farmers to investigate their motivations to carry out the management. We found a positive influence of active management on the semi-open structure of wood-pastures. Financial support was vital for management, but personal values related to tradition also played an important role. The interviewees differed widely in their range of motivations, suggesting that other strategies in addition to financial incentives would further improve the management of wood-pastures in the region.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-015-0719-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.     

Temporal Trends in the Spatial Distribution of Impervious Cover Relative to Stream Location

Use of impervious cover is transitioning from an indicator of surface water condition to one that also guides and informs watershed planning and management, including Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. §1251 et seq.) reporting. Whether it is for understanding surface water condition or planning and management, impervious cover is most commonly expressed as summary measurement (e.g., percentage watershed in impervious cover). We use the National Land Cover Database to estimate impervious cover in the vicinity of surface waters for three time periods (2001, 2006, 2011). We also compare impervious cover in the vicinity of surface waters to watershed summary estimates of impervious cover for classifying the spatial pattern of impervious cover. Between 2001 and 2011, surface water shorelines (streams and water bodies) in the vicinity of impervious cover increased nearly 10,000 km. Across all time periods, approximately 27% of the watersheds in the continental United States had proximally distributed impervious cover, i.e., the percentage of impervious cover in the vicinity of surface waters was higher than its watershed summary expression. We discuss how impervious cover spatial pattern can be used to inform watershed planning and management, including reporting under the Clean Water Act.     

Governing sustainability: a dialogue between Local Agenda 21 and transition management

Since the 1990s, the local level of governance has become increasingly important in addressing the challenge of sustainable development. In this article, we compare two approaches that seek to address sustainability locally, namely Local Agenda 21 and transition management. Discussing both approaches along six dimensions (history, aim, kind of change, governance understanding, process methodologies, and actors), we formulate general insights into the governance of sustainability in cities, towns, and neighbourhoods. This dialogue illustrates two related modes of thinking about sustainability governance. We touch upon the importance of an integrated perspective on sustainability transitions through which sustainability is made meaningful locally in collaborative processes. We suggest that the explicit orientation towards radical change is a precondition for governing sustainability in a way that addresses the root causes of societal challenges. Governing sustainability should address the tensions between aiming for radical change and working with status quo-oriented actors and governing settings. We conclude that governing sustainability should be about finding creative ways for opening spaces for participation, change, and experimentation, that is, for creating alternative ideas, practices, and social relations. These spaces for innovation encourage a reflexive stance on ways of working and one's own roles and attitudes, thereby preparing a fertile terrain for actors to engage in change from different perspectives.     

PACE2016中国环境治理国际研讨会综述

PACE2016中国环境治理国际研讨会就中国环境政府治理、环境市场治理、环境社会治理以及环境治理结构展开了深入研讨并达成以下共识:大国模式下的环境政府治理面临着突出的"污染避难所效应"、"公平与效率的两难"和"多层次治理体系"等问题;不成熟市场经济条件下环境市场治理必然面临"要不要走环境治理市场化之路"的疑虑,相关研究表明市场手段作为有效的环境治理方式正在逐渐地打消此等疑虑;中国环境治理最主要的短板在于社会治理,提高公众参与度的主要挑战在于改变地方政府的态度,然而社会企业家是环境社会治理的希望;多元环境治理结构是中国环境治理的必然选择,政府引领、企业自觉、公众参与的制衡机制是关键。     

基于工业生态化建设的工业园区环境管理研究

工业园区是产业集聚的载体,是区域经济发展的引擎。工业园区同时又是污染产生排放集中地,我国工业园区在发展过程中随着经济总量扩大、资源和能源消耗的增加,出现了大量的环境问题,阻碍了园区的可持续发展。工业园区的环境管理可以从园区层面出发解决污染问题,这是个既复杂又重要的工作。本文在分析工业园区发展历程的基础上揭示了目前工业园区存在的环境问题,以及管理方面存在的缺陷和不足,发现总体上园区环境管理水平较差。工业生态化建设为进行合理的园区环境管理提供了一个契机,本文针对我国工业园区的发展现状及发展趋势,提出基于工业生态化建设的工业园区环境管理的对策:1提升生态工业的意识,鼓励公众参与;2确立生态化建设思想,以生态化建设促进环境管理效率的提升;3加强工业生态化建设相关政策法规、规划的完善和实施;4构建工业生态化建设信息服务平台,以生态化建设来实现工业园区科学的环境管理。     

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.     

Simulative governance: on the collaborative narrative of civil society participation in the CDM stakeholder framework

The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often cited as an exemplar of new, hybrid forms of global environmental governance operating at the public–private interface. Practically, enacting this arrangement involves a wide range of non-state actors. This broad involvement is here assumed to mark a shift towards more polycentric and networked modes of governance in which agents collaborate as ‘stakeholders’ in the process of consensual rule-setting and implementation. Using post-political critique, the depoliticising effects of the stakeholder framework on civil society actors are interrogated, using formal and informal participation opportunities to raise concerns regarding specific CDM projects. The analysis suggests that the CDM’s collaborative narrative of stakeholding structurally fails to stimulate public (re)engagement and is, instead, a prime example of simulative governance that struggles to achieve the simultaneity of two incompatibilities: the participatory revolution and the post-political turn.