Environment Actors Research Articles

Ant logic and necrolocutors

As environmental research increasingly values and foregrounds traditional knowledge in a reinvigorated participatory turn, many of the original problematics and harms re-emerge through ostensible collaborations with knowledge-holders. These issues are not just instances of ethical oversight; they are the result of ant logic: narrow, spatialized conceptualizations of power, knowledge, and death as contained and fixed within bodies and space and preoccupations with visibility that produces ontological conceptions of local communities, traditional knowledge-holders, state actors, and neoliberal forces. This article unwinds the tight Foucauldian grip with which environmental social sciences are held to reveal power, knowledge, and death as vibrant, immaterial actors and explores the role of ant logic as an actor itself. In doing so, another key environmental actor is uncovered, one who leverages the death-centric form of articulation to define power and knowledge: the necrolocutor.

China’s Modern Ecological History: Bringing the Politics Back In

Stevan Harrell’s systems approach contributes a revelatory metaphor for our understanding of modern Chinese ecological history, upending traditional periodization and geographic conventions. There are risks to this approach, however, in that we lose some of the centrality of the state as an environmental actor. By moving the analysis up a level of abstraction as Harrell does, we risk depoliticizing the environmental history of the Mao Zedong years and beyond.

From Securing the Border to Securing Nature: Homeland Security as an Emerging Environmental Actor in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands

Hundreds of miles of barriers span the U.S.–Mexico border, not only blocking the migration of people, but also crisscrossing National Parks and Wildlife Refuges and bifurcating important wildlife corridors in the process. Despite their location within federally protected places, the past and present construction of these barriers has progressed unencumbered by federal oversight given the waiver of dozens of environmental regulations. This shift in regulation amid increased border militarization has not been fully evaluated for its environmental effects, as federal conservation agencies tasked with managing public borderlands are increasingly prohibited from studying how barriers will affect the landscape in the long term. This research examines how the state is shaping environmental governance and knowledge politics in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, an environmentally significant and hyperpoliticized region integral to the maintenance of the United States as an imperial border-making institution. Bringing together theories on political ecologies of the settler colonial state with the racialization of nature, this article demonstrates how (1) the Department of Homeland Security has emerged as an environmental actor produced through a reconfiguration of settler state power; (2) knowledge claims about the environment are produced in ways that elide the ecological consequences of border barriers; and (3) racialized discourses of migrants are codified in environmental governing documents that support increased border militarization. I conclude with a discussion of how settler colonial technologies of environmental governance create new geographies of militarization and conservation in federally protected places along the U.S.–Mexico border.

Qualitatively recognizing the dimensions of student environmental identity development within the classroom context

AbstractThis study qualitatively explored the process of student environmental identity development (sEID) within the highly social and structured context of elementary school science. Social practice theory was used as the lens to distinguish the dimensions of sEID that were visible during a curriculum‐based, in‐school program focused on the issue of pollution. Student narratives, collected from small group interviews and reflective journals, were prioritized to capture the process of students in context identifying as “being for the environment.” Data collected from 35 grade six students were qualitatively coded, a network diagram was used to visualize the relationships in the data, and a research vignette was constructed. Eight dimensions were recognized as contributing to sEID; the opportunity to be an environmental actor with peers, increased awareness of environmental threat, emotional responses, self‐recognition for environmental action, perceived agency, changed behavior across social contexts, social recognition for identity actions, and personal meaning. While many of these dimensions have been directly or indirectly discussed in the research on adult environmentalists, shifting the emphasis from group membership to the individual student in context led to the addition of two dimensions—personal meaning and emotional responses. Recognizing the eight dimensions of sEID is an important contribution to the literature as students engaging in environmental action as a requirement of school is distinct from the existing research. Identifying the dimensions of sEID can support the intentional design of learning sequences that foster environmental identities in school and beyond.

The eco-munitionary subject: Conservation with and of firearms

The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 was a transformative piece of legislation for wildlife management and conservation in the United States, incentivizing the creation of state wildlife agencies and establishing funding mechanisms for these agencies. The legislation directs an excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment to a fund to support wildlife restoration projects by state wildlife agencies. In 2021 alone, this generated more than $1 billion in project funds. Although commonly framed as a user pays model of conservation whereby hunters fund wildlife management, most of the excise taxes collected on firearms and ammunition are now associated with non-hunting uses. Despite this disconnect, many firearms industry groups continue to support and promote their relationship to Pittman-Robertson. Here, we examine the role of Pittman-Robertson in shaping the relationship between firearms and conservation and seek to understand how this relationship is reproduced. We examine this shifting relationship through an analysis of amendments to Pittman-Robertson since its creation and a discourse analysis of contemporary materials from web sites of firearms, hunting, shooting, and conservation organizations. Drawing on the concept of environmentality and diverse ecologies, we argue that Pittman-Robertson has contributed to the production of, and been re-shaped by, a distinct environmental actor: the eco-munitionary subject.

Does Government-Led Publicity Enhance Corporate Green Behavior? Empirical Evidence from Green Xuanguan in China

Promoting green behavior among corporations is essential to the green transition of industrial sectors in China. There is a unique government-led green publicity institution, ‘Xuanguan‘, that expects to accelerate the green idea and policy spread top-down in the economic system in China. However, few studies discussed its role in formulating corporate green behavior. By constructing an integrated model of Government-led publicity-Internal and external perception-Corporate green behavior, this paper explored the effect of government-led green publicity on corporate green behavior, based on the survey data of 199 industrial manufacturing corporations in Henan Province, China. A structural equation model (SEM) was adopted to detect the influence and influential path. The results found that government-led green publicity could positively enhance green behavior via improving the corporate internal perception of risk and opportunity and improving the corporate perception of external environment actors. The heterogeneity tests showed that type of publicity channels, corporate ownership, and corporate scale made different effects on the results. Further analysis proved that government-led publicity could enhance the function of formal environmental regulation. It implies that government-led publicity can be a good compensation for formal regulations and stimulate green behavior. This paper demonstrates a new factor of enhancing corporate behavior and contributed new evidence of China’s green development story.

The Terror Campaign of Boko Haram: Its Transformation and Challenges to Nigeria’s Security

This paper is geared toward analyzing the patterns and dynamics of the Boko Haram attacks and the challenges they caused to the country's security. The report uses the assumptions of the instrumental approach, which states that the purpose of terrorism is to bring about insecurity in an actor's environment. The pattern of terrorism follows an action-reaction process. Thereby it responds to what Government does. It also utilizes the data collected from secondary sources and qualitatively analyses it. The paper discovered that Boko Haram, a proscribed international terrorist organization, is continuously posing serious security challenges to Nigeria that have resulted in the loss of over 30.000 lives and the destruction of public and private properties worth billions of US dollars. The group has committed itself to asymmetric warfare. Since its re-emergence, it had tried to mimic and adopt the tactics and strategies of global Salafist movements, which manifested in armed assaults, bombings, and abductions. The paper recommended that a comprehensive approach be adopted that would take care of both kinetic and non-kinetic measures to end the menace of terrorism in Nigeria. Training and retraining of security personnel on asymmetric warfare are required to balance the increasing adaptability of the terrorists.

Environment Actors Confronting a Post Climate-Related Disaster Scenario: A Feasibility Study of an Action-Based Intervention Aiming to Promote Climate Action.

(1) A climate change awareness-action gap still prevails in our society, with individuals showing significant social inertia regarding environmental issues. The communication on climate change is pointed out as one of the causes of the social inertia; (2) Following an action-oriented transformation research, the main goal of this study was to ascertain the feasibility of an action-based communication intervention, based on the participants’ exposure to a post climate-related disaster scenario. The feasibility of the action-based communication intervention was assessed in a focus group meeting, whose content was qualitatively analysed; (3) The results of this study demonstrate that action-based communication interventions are feasible to trigger an attitude transformation, catalysed by the experiential processing of climate change and by the affect arousal; (4) This study comes to contribute to a transformation of the climate change communication praxis, by highlighting the urgency to shift the for a new paradigm of communicating climate change, in which the affect and the experiential processing should account for conveying environment-related information in order to promote society’s climate action.

Train Stations Spatial and Technological Challenges in Iraq: A Case Study

Innovation has two key levers: the capacity to consider and predict consumer desires, on the one hand, and the building of collaboration between the economic environment, metropolitan players, and knowledge and development actors, somewhere else. Innovation is not just technical, and it disrupts traditions and station partners' aspirations and perceptions: planners, administrators, consumers or clients, and causes a change in locations and uses. The expansion of the rail network in Iraq is renewing station sites, especially in Iraq, which, at the cost of medium-sized cities between these cities, prefer the logic of productivity-focused on express services between major cities. On the field, this alternative translates into two styles of stations that are central base stations for significant towns, and medium- and small-town terminals—establishing stations benefits from an interconnected phase of all spatial organization types. Suppose we research the decision phase that led to the establishment of train stations in Iraq. In that case, we find that this option and construction strategies are a mixture of component elements according to the area details served and actors' strategies. Most chosen sites result from deep relationships between global, regional, and local reasoning.

Media Coverage and Perceived Policy Influence of Environmental Actors: Good Strategy or Pyrrhic Victory?

In this article we analyze how media coverage for environmental actors (individual environmental activists and environmental movement organizations) is associated with their perceived policy influence in Canadian climate change policy networks. We conceptualize media coverage as the total number of media mentions an actor received in Canada’s two main national newspapers—the <em>Globe and Mail</em> and <em>National Post</em>. We conceptualize perceived policy influence as the total number of times an actor was nominated by other actors in a policy network as being perceived to be influential in domestic climate change policy making in Canada. Literature from the field of social movements, agenda setting, and policy networks suggests that environmental actors who garner more media coverage should be perceived as more influential in policy networks than actors who garner less coverage. We assess support for this main hypothesis in two ways. First, we analyze how actor attributes (such as the type of actor) are associated with the amount of media coverage an actor receives. Second, we evaluate whether being an environmental actor shapes the association between media coverage and perceived policy influence. We find a negative association between media coverage and perceived policy influence for individual activists, but not for environmental movement organizations. This case raises fundamental theoretical questions about the nature of relations between media and policy spheres, and the efficacy of media for signaling and mobilizing policy influence.

Relationships and Operations in a Sign-Based World Model of the Actor

According to the modern theories on the emergence of mental functions and the respective role of neurophysiological processes, the formation of mental functions is associated with the existence or communicative synthesis of specific information structures that contain three types of information of different origins: information from the external environment, information extracted from memory, and information from motivation centers. These components are bound together via their naming; this also ensures the stability of the emerging structures. We refer to such information structures as signs due to their resemblance to similar structures that have been studied in semiotics. A set of signs formed by a actor during activities and communication produces their sign-based world model, which reflects their ideas about the environment, themselves, and other actors. The sign-based world model allows setting and solving a number of tasks arising in behavior modeling for intelligent agents and their coalitions such as goal-setting, purposeful behavior synthesis, role distribution, and the interaction of agents in the coalition. This paper studies a special object, that is, the causal matrix, which describes the structure of the sign components. Operations and relationships in the sign-based world view model, which simulates the psychological characteristics of human behavior, are determined on this basis.

Improving The Level of Critical Infrastructure Protection by Developing Resilience

Abstract Modern society is characterized by the increasing interdependence between the actors of the international environment, in the conditions of globalization of all the fields of social life. Increasing interdependencies, together with the emergence of new risks and threats, which attempt to exploit systemic vulnerabilities, which are increasingly numerous and difficult to eliminate, bring a new issue to states and other security environment actors: to ensure the protection the infrastructure elements that are indispensable to the normal activity of the population, economic agents, nongovernmental organizations and state institutions. Critical Infrastructure Protection becomes an important point on the agenda of all decision-makers who are in a position to counter the asymmetric threats that jeopardize national interests and democratic values. Due to the multiplication of risks and threats and the multiplication of interdependencies between the various infrastructure elements, the protection of critical infrastructures can not be achieved effectively only by ensuring their physical protection. The cascading effects of a disturbance can be felt at the level of society as a whole, and it is therefore necessary to address the issue of ensuring the protection of critical infrastructures in a comprehensive manner including infrastructure and community resilience issues.

Contribuições do Empreendedorismo Social para o Aumento da Participação das Mulheres no Mercado de Trabalho

Para este estudo realizou-se uma pesquisa de caráter descritivo e de natureza qualitativa, cujo objetivo é analisar a perspectiva de coordenadoras e integrantes de empreendimentos coletivos inseridos em uma incubadora social brasileira. Especificamente, serão contempladas as contribuições do empreendedorismo social, uma vez que houve aumento da participação feminina no mercado de trabalho. O contexto de análise foi definido por meio de categorias definidas a priori, baseadas em um modelo teórico que contempla as dimensões: capital humano, vontade e viabilidade, capital social, atores do ambiente social e institucional. As categorias definidas a posteriori contemplaram as categorias: empoderamento, valorização e realização pessoal. No que tange a inclusão feminina no mercado de trabalho, os resultados refletiram algumas dificuldades enfrentadas por mulheres participantes dos empreendimentos, destacando a falta de oportunidades de qualificação e participação no mercado formal. Para muitas entrevistadas, participar desses empreendimentos representou a primeira oportunidade de inclusão no mundo do trabalho.

Functional landscapes in cities: a systems approach

Human enterprise and endeavour increasingly influence global processes of change, from the planetary scale down to the very local. Cities are hubs of human activity, and as the places where the majority of the world’s population live we must, when looking into an uncertain future, consider how we think about urban design. Cities are densely inhabited, lived-in landscapes where human presence and perceptions are deeply enmeshed with biophysical and built infrastructures. As such, they present complex mosaics of different habitats and competing uses, ever changing in response to human and physical drivers. If designed properly, green infrastructure can contribute many important functions to a city. Efforts to strategically make use of green infrastructure can benefit considerably from a systems perspective where linkages and cross-boundary dynamics are at the very least as important as individual components. Design, planning and governance of requirements for green infrastructure also extend far beyond biophysical elements and components. Recognition of interconnections between individual green spaces, green infrastructure and the built environment, the physical environment and diverse actors, and formal and informal governance arrangements—as outlined in the four design principles in this article—is a first important step towards a more comprehensive and inclusive approach, not least to green infrastructure planning and design.

Weaponizing nature: The geopolitical ecology of the US Navy’s biofuel program

The United States military is treating climate change as a crucial factor in its preparation for future conflicts. This concern manifests not only in strategic planning and forward-looking documents, but also in building infrastructural capacity and material provision. Yet, the impetus to ‘green’ the military goes beyond the deployment of existing technologies. We examine several facets of the military's role as an environmental actor, particularly through its promotion of the US Navy's ‘Great Green Fleet’ (GGF), which actively supports the development of advanced biofuels by subsidizing their development and facilitating wider marketization. The GGF promises to reduce military reliance on conventional fossil fuels and reconfigure its energy sourcing, thus reducing dependence on imported hydrocarbons; this is with an eye towards ultimately severing the logistical relationship between existing energy infrastructures and the spaces of military intervention. Taking an integrated lens of political ecology and geopolitics - ‘geopolitical ecology’ - we seek to provide an understanding of the production of weaponized nature. We demonstrate that the US military's discursive use of climate change to justify the provision of new military hardware and advanced biofuels promotes a vision of resource conflicts to support the development of technologies to overcome the constraints to delivery of fuel to emergent front lines. We argue that while this may appear to be militarized greenwashing, it signals a shift in the logics and practices of fuel sourcing driven by a dystopian vision of climate change, which the US military played a significant role in creating.

A new era for global energy governance? The environmental imperatives and the EU perspective

The ongoing restructuring of the global energy scene necessitates both national governments and energy associated institutions to reconfigure their agenda, reconsider their priorities and even undergo internal reforms in order to adapt to the current and future energy trends. The prospect of global energy governance, within a reformed institutional framework, emerges as a pivotal issue for global politics. The purpose of this research paper is twofold; to analyze the evolution of global energy governance and energy institutions around two key topics: the expansion of renewable energy (RE) sources and technologies and the climate change mitigation. Besides, to identify the role of the European Union (EU) as global energy and environmental actor. The research paper will focus on the EU’s positioning in the international energy and environmental initiatives and the role of renewable energy (RE) in its energy policy configuration.

Shaping the Gender Socialization Through Different Models of Behavior

Gender equality education prepares civics who takes responsibilities for social, politic, economic issues and even for democratization processes. Its social effect, if it is not treated carefully may lead into the discrimination of some individual`s categories according to gender basis. The consciousness and the commitment for achieving gender equality are reflected even in the policies and strategies for education development. Including gender perspective in schools is a prerequisite inalienable of human development, instead insuring gender equality it is considered as respecting human rights. School environment, community and other actors have their influence into the creation of a perfect climate for realizing the education process in the most effective way. Attitudes, parents and teachers behaviors are seen as a role model and affect the civic education of pupils. From the other side, they help into solving the gender problems of pupils. Comparing the ratio of gender stereotypes exposure between attitudes and stands in the education system we conclude that there is a need for increasing the care that must be shown for integrating the gender education in the civic education framework of students.The scope of the undertaken study is to perform the scale and shape in which gender stereotypes are portrayed and shown in social life and their affect in the education for a democratic society. To achieve this scope, we use the method of studying the existing literature; a detailed analysis of the questionnaires and interviews content with school directors and teachers of pre-graduated education conducting researches abroad geographical extension in cities: Shkoder, Tirane, Elbasan, Pogradec, Korce. Nurturing the values of democratic culture, spiritual emancipation and open mind, enables shaping healthy individuals ready to contribute to the proper well-functioning society. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p27

The University and the Business Environment - Partnership for Education

Insertion of higher education graduates in the labor market is a key concern of economic and social environment actors (universities, representatives of business, professional associations or NGOs). From this perspective, universities are obliged to develop active partnerships with business in regard with social and professional needs, but also to the needs of students. Partnerships must bring benefits to both universities and employers. The paper presents forms of partnership developed by universities and businesses and analyzes the views expressed by the representatives of employers engaged in active partnerships with the most prestigious economic university in Romania, Bucharest University of Economic Studies.

Review: Environmental Policy in the EU: Actors, Institutions and Processes

recognising that environmental policy is no longer a new and precarious gate-crasher among the EU’s competencies and is now an established part of the EU’s identity and purpose. As such, debates on how environmental policy operated ‘without portfolio’ and secured a legal foothold, or how sustainable development became a formal objective of European integration, remain important in helping students to build up a picture of why EU environmental policy making has evolved in particular ways, but require less attention compared with understanding how interplays between Europe’s governing institutions and member states continue to shape EU environmental politics or more recent political debates over the adoption of new modes and instruments of governing. The two main manifestations of this shift in emphasis are: the inclusion of helpful chapter summaries and recommended reading lists to guide students through theoretical debates and policy developments for each topic; and a tauter sense of progression through the themes explored. Previous editions had a similar construction, with sections on: “The historical and institutional context of EU environmental policy”; “Key actors involved in environmental policymaking”; “The policy dynamics of EU environmental policy”; and “Future challenges”. What is most striking this time around is the precision with which each section is composed to guide readers through topics. Whereas “Policy dynamics” in the second edition contained three articles (on task expansion, accommodating diversity, and rule making) that refl ected particular policy dynamics without ever claiming to provide a comprehensive review of all policy dynamics, the third edition studiously subdivides policy processes into chapters on: agenda setting; policy making; coordination; implementation; evaluation; and the EU as an international environmental actor. The net effect of these changes and the authorship of each chapter by leading scholars is an accessible but highly authoritative text for those interested in, but without extensive prior knowledge of, the European Union. One more disappointing absence is a dedicated section on ‘making EU environmental policy’ and the resulting dearth of detailed case studies of how key pieces of legislation emerged on the EU’s political agenda and were negotiated and implemented. For a geographer such as myself these more microlevel analyses of the EU’s regulatory travails and triumphs provided different but no less revealing insights into the factors shaping the EU’s capacity

Potential impacts of slum urbanisation on channel bank storage in the Bang Pakong River, Thailand

Generally regarded as social phenomena, this paper regards slum urbanisation as an environmental actor. Specifically, how slum developments modify hydrogeomorphological processes motivates this research. Using the Bang Pakong River, eastern Thailand, as a case study, a literature review was conducted. The literature reviewed indicated changes in physical processes such as channel bank stability, water quality, flow regimes and the hydrological balance equations can occur with slum development. Given the importance of channel banks as the physical basis of many slum sites, this paper focuses on the possible changes to channel bank storage in the Bang Pakong River following slum urbanisation. The research highlights possible changes to channel bank storage processes, notably decreased storage recharge rates; increased anthropogenic extraction; and probable water quality deterioration. Deeper scientific understanding of how river processes are affected by specific forms of urban development can contribute to better management of both informal urban settlements and rivers.