Framework For Environmental Governance Research Articles

Ecological Civilization: A Blindspot in Global Media Coverage of China’s Environmental Governance

ABSTRACT China’s frenetic pace of economic development in recent decades has come with significant environmental costs. Confronted by this dire situation, the Chinese government has proposed the concept of ecological civilization as both an aspirational goal for sustainability and a guide to environmental policymaking. Despite this concept’s current centrality in China’s environmental discourse, little is known about how it is covered by media outlets outside China. In this article, we address this research gap by analyzing the framing of ecological civilization in English-language media outside China. Our qualitative discourse analysis reveals three major storylines that define the concept in conflicting ways: (1) ecological civilization as an environmental governance framework, (2) ecological civilization as a misleading propaganda ploy, and (3) ecological civilization as an eco-socialist blueprint. In light of these findings, we conclude by highlighting the potential of ecological civilization for advancing global conversations about transcending capitalism.

Environmental Impact Assessment: A Middle Eastern Experience

Abstract Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is an important environmental protection tool introduced into the environmental governance framework to evaluate and inform the administrative decision-making processes regarding whether certain developments or projects are to be allowed. In this article, EIA’s legal status and procedure are examined in relation to a Middle Eastern context, specifically to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Two different types of analysis are employed. The first is doctrinal analysis, focusing on the legal and statutory provisions regulating and organising this environmental protection tool—this genre of analysis entails identifying and unpacking the laws and regulations that govern this tool. The second type is qualitative analysis involving original data from 27 semi-structured interviews—one of the first of its kind on this topic in the KSA. The key contribution of the article comprises the examination and synthesis of the current status of different theories in the current international literature with regard to the underexplored issue of EIAs in the KSA.

Environmental, social and corporate governance framework for corporate disclosure: a multicriteria dimension analysis approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide to the Board of Directors and CEOs of a firm to be aware of and accountable for the information they provide to the public. As long as the quality of the companies’ public information is high, it will be able to retain its investors as well as to obtain new ones more easily.Design/methodology/approachThis paper introduces a Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) tool with the use of the PROMETHEE II method to formulate an alternative aggregate ESG quality approach. We conduct comparisons in a sectorial and regional based perspective during different exam periods before and after the implementation of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), in an attempt to provide a robust framework for corporate disclosure reporting.FindingsThe findings are of particular interest to both scholars and decision-makers, including providers of corporate governance indices and rating agencies. The innovation of this paper lies among others in using the MCDA method with the ESG framework, which proposes a combination of qualitative and quantitative criteria, enabling experienced and/or not experienced analysts to avoid manipulating techniques in business information.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample of companies based on the US and Europe companies incorporating only large-sized ones.Practical implicationsFindings are of particular interest to both scholars and decision-makers including providers of corporate governance indices and rating agencies.Social implicationsBetter understanding features pay key importance for increasing the “quality” information in firms financial statements, especially after the use of IFRS in reporting standards.Originality/valueThe authors proceed to analysis using a multiple perspective use that is decomposed into the following options: (a) Time-period oriented option, (b) Regional-oriented option and (c) Sectoral-oriented option respectively.

Decentralizing while centralizing: An explanation of China's collective forestry reform since the 1980s

Governance systems are characterized by differing degrees of centralized vs decentralized decision-making and distribution of powers. This study investigates the history of Chinese centralized decentralization reforms in collective forestry using data from government documents and secondary literature based on the democratic decentralization and environmental governance frameworks. Additionally, it divides China's collective forest decentralization reform into three stages since the 1980s—the “economic development” period, “marketization cultivation” period, and “ecological protection” period. Our findings indicate that the effect of decentralization reform is largely due to whether the decentralization reform is consistent with the national government's centralized means/mechanism. In the economic development period (1980–1991), there were two sources of conflict: (1) between the centralized timber market system (unified purchase and sales system in state-owned forest) and the opening of the collective forest timber market; and (2) between the horizontal government upward accountability system and the decentralization of financial power to local governments. In the marketization cultivation period (1992–2002), the conflict between the horizontal government upward accountability system and decentralized financial power to the local government still existed, but the centralized fiscal policy of monetary tightening complemented the full-scale opening of the forestry market. During the ecological protection period (2003-present), the vertical government upward accountability system has complemented the devolution of financial power to forestry departments. We also find that the results of decentralization reforms of the government and market system usually affect the decentralization reform results of the community system.

Mapping power relations in SEA – The role of statutory environmental consultees. An Italian case-study

Since its very inception in the late decades of the twentieth century, environmental assessment (EA) has been imbued with a complex interplay of power, knowledge and values. Despite instrumental rationality seemingly dominating current practices, actors are faced with growing relational complexity and seem to be slowly becoming increasingly mindful of political, social and cultural implications of EA. Within this context, this paper explores the role of statutory environmental consultees in strategic environmental assessment (SEA), by reflecting on issues of power among the different actors involved, the handling of values and the generation, use and exchange of knowledge in SEA processes. The authors adopted a framework for contemporary environmental governance to map actors’ strategies onto a conceptual space stretching along two directions: the polarization between confrontational and collaborative attitudes, and the tendency to underpin knowledge claims with factual evidence or subjective considerations. By dwelling on a case study concerning the SEA of a national programme to promote sustainable urban development in metropolitan areas in Italy, the use of objectivity to support either neutrality- or advocacy-oriented approaches is contrasted with the use of strategies where statutory consultees have shown more adaptive and confrontational behaviours – that hinge upon both political and scientific legitimacy – to pursue their particular organizational strategies agendas.

The rise of technocratic environmentalism: the United States, Antarctica, and the globalisation of the environmental impact statement

Environmental impact statements (EISs), and the related environmental impact assessments (EIAs) which precede them, have become central elements of environmental management, governance, and policy worldwide since their introduction in the United States in 1970. Assessing environmental impact has a particular force and centrality within modern Antarctic environmental management and governance too. This article investigates the ways in which the United States used EISs and EIAs in Antarctica between 1970 and 1982 – during their first decade of existence in US law and during a geopolitically and scientifically vibrant decade in Antarctic affairs – as a way of illuminating the broader conceptual and historical aspects of this central, though understudied, environmental governance tool and framework. We historicise and draw attention to the EIS – individually, as a regulatory genre, and as a genre that articulates regional, global and planetary environments – as highly influential and powerful documents demanding attention from environmental historians and historical geographers. We argue that the prominence of EISs in Antarctica arose because they appealed to top-down, process-oriented approaches favoured in Antarctic governance – a technocratic environmentalism – and because of their spatial elements, particularly their tendency to upscaling.

A PROPOSED FRAMEWORK FOR APPLYING ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE TO ACTIVATE SUSTAINABLE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

The study aimed to highlight the importance of the role of environmental governance in improving the environmental performance of hotel and tourism establishments and to explain its impact on the facility's ability to adhere to environmental laws and legislation. The study also aims to set a proposed framework for the application of environmental governance that aims to activate sustainable tourism development by defining the relationship between the application of environmental governance and the quality of environmental performance in tourism companies and their impact on achieving sustainable development. To achieve the goals of the study and access to the best methods and methods for detecting an assessment of the economic and environmental impacts resulting from the application of environmental governance in order to activate and achieve sustainable development and know the extent of its impact on tourism development as a treatment for the study problem, the researchers prepared a survey form as a tool for the field study, and the descriptive approach was used to indicate, interpret and analyze the results of Field study and homework test. The study community represents tourism companies, hotels and tourist villages due to the importance of the environment for sustainable tourism development. The study sample was represented by members of the board of directors, managers, and oversight management staff, and preparing financial statements and references.The results of the study hypothesis test showed that there is a fundamental effect of applying the principle of ensuring an effective framework for environmental governance to achieve sustainable tourism development in enhancing the quality of tourism services. The study recommended the necessity of applying environmental governance in tourist and hotel establishments, paying attention to environmental management systems, and exercising management in accordance with legislation and laws, as well as working to compel it to measure environmental information. And disclosure in the financial reports to enable assessment of the suitability and effectiveness of the environmental performance system with the need to have credibility in the published environmental information, and the need for environmental principles and standards upon which to perform environmental auditing with the presence of an environmental audit department in hotel and tourist establishments. And work to spread environmental awareness regarding the application of environmentally friendly and long-term practices to achieve sustainable tourism development.

Short Essays on Business Strategy and Management

This essays on business strategy and management consist of three articles based on sustainability business concept. The article introduces the idea of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) framework to address the societal problem; zebra business concept and gamification approach for sustainable employee engagement.

Do unilateral trade measures really catalyze multilateral environmental agreements?

Unilateralism remains an opaque concept associated with discriminatory or coercive policy implications. Legal controversies about unilateralism have not prevented a continuing proliferation of unilateral trade measures in domestic fishery management regimes to deter illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. The widespread application of trade leverage requires a refined study of the confluence of multilateral trade and environmental governance frameworks on novel state activism. This article probes the long-running trajectory of the US Tuna and Shrimp disputes within the cross-institutional context of the World Trade Organization, multilateral environmental agreements and regional fisheries management organizations. It aims to shed new light on the nexus between unilateral trade measures and multilateral environmental agreements as an evolving and mutually adaptive process. Inspired is the critical thinking on elevating trade and environmental partnerships to coherently monitor and discipline trade unilateralism in its indirect role to ameliorate global environmental problems.

A framework for oceans – lessons in environmental governance

ABSTRACTOcean governance has been portrayed as a challenge since the seas have many resources and valuable environmental features with interested parties across jurisdictions. Different types of ocean governance are recognised worldwide in countries ranging from law-centred practices to planning across set periods of time. Australia coasts and oceans have three layers of government with institutional arrangements across many layers of actors. Trends indicate uncertainty for many listed species, despite improving management in some areas, as reported in the Australian State of the Environment publications. Environmental governance has recently been used as a solution to deal with the scale of environmental problems of oceans and the associated blue economy. Environmental governance has dealt with processes of efficiency, effectiveness, institutional arrangements, social justice and capacity building, but much of this literature focuses on process and lacks an outcome and performance orientation. This paper presents a framework for environmental governance that addressed this lack of outcome and performance orientation. Examining the case study of marine reserves in Victoria, Australian insights are presented that may be significant for future ocean governance.

The New Office for Environmental Protection: Scrutinising and Enforcing Environmental Law after Brexit

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published its draft Environment (Principles and Governance) Bill on 19 December 2018, in order to begin the task of putting in place domestic environmental governance frameworks after the UK has left the EU. This short working paper provides initial thoughts on the role of the proposed new Office for Environmental Protection in scrutinising, monitoring, reporting, advising and enforcement.

Environmental Governance of the Arctic: Next Steps – Diverse, Compatible, Needed

The urgency of applying effective legal strategies to respond to environmental change in the Arctic is ever more apparent. The existing framework for environmental governance has matured and its constituents are numerous, and many are promising. However, policymakers and other stakeholders contend that new approaches to confronting environmental conditions, including mitigation of climate change and adapting to it, are needed. Many ideas have been offered; they range considerably in their assessment of what changes are needed and by when. Here we briefly describe the cluster of constituents of environmental governance, the international environmental regime, of the Arctic; we briefly note newly recommended approaches; and we analyse two approaches we consider most promising. These, cooperative scientific-based management strategies and adversarial legal actions, are dissimilar – to the point that some policy makers consider them incompatible. We argue, however, that both are needed and we describe elements of their successful use.

Geoengineering and geographers: Rewriting the Earth in what image?

Large‐scale intervention in the Earth's climate system features centrally both in definitions of, and proposed responses to, the Anthropocene. In its deliberate guise – as climate geoengineering – such intervention is highly contentious, threatening to profoundly reshape the geography and politics of environmental governance frameworks, not to mention the nature of the environments towards which those frameworks are oriented. Yet, even as experiments with geoengineering technologies are growing in number, geographers continue to engage seldom with scientific, political or indeed public debates about them. In this paper we contend that geographical ideas about space, scale, power and geopolitics must urgently be brought to bear on ongoing efforts to experiment with geoengineering, and to deliberate its future role in responses to climate change. We develop this argument in two parts. First, we suggest that ongoing debates about the acceptability of geoengineering experimentation would benefit from recognising incumbent spatial and scalar categorisations (e.g., small scale vs. large scale, indoors vs. outdoors) not as fixed ontological anchors, but as relational and provisional constructs, open to being rethought in new, potentially productive ways. Second, we call for geographers to document and contest inequalities and injustices, both in debates about what geoengineering is or might become, and in the outcomes generated by efforts to undertake geoengineering in practice. Here there are opportunities for geographers to reshape the frames of reference used by others to comprehend the implications of the Anthropocene itself, drawing on traditional disciplinary strengths in ecofeminism, political ecology and environmental justice, as well as the production of space and critical geopolitics. Such endeavours, we contend, will form a vital complement to existing geographical engagements with the concept of the Anthropocene, reaffirming the value of the discipline's distinctive – and explicitly normative – voice within ongoing policy and public deliberations.

Producing Localized Commodity Frontiers at the End of Cheap Nature: An Analysis of Eco‐scalar Carbon Fixes and their Consequences

AbstractThere is no single ‘great’ commodity frontier whose exploitation under current socio‐technical conditions could fuel capital accumulation at the global scale. According to Jason Moore, this represents the ‘end of Cheap Nature’ and signals a terminal crisis for capitalism as we know it. In this article we complicate this assertion by showing how, in the context of global environmental governance frameworks of carbon control, a diverse range of actors situated at multiple scales are intensifying the use of cities and their hinterlands for the production/transgression of localized commodity frontiers. We draw on scholarship on uneven geographical development, state‐led restructuring and eco‐scalar fixes to present two case studies from different segments of the carbon cycle in the global South. The first case demonstrates how the introduction of waste‐to‐energy technology in Delhi facilitated the generation of ‘carbon credits’ while waste matter itself became a commodity. The second discusses attempts by the Brazilian state of Amazonas (Amazônia) aspiring to shift from rainforest exploitation to financialized conservation supported by the ‘green global city’ functions of metropolitan Manaus. These cases demonstrate that although the global carbon‐control regime may enable accumulation, implementation remains speculative, and localized commodity frontiers provoke social resistances that jeopardize their durability.

Smart Earth: A meta-review and implications for environmental governance

Abstract Environmental governance has the potential to be significantly transformed by Smart Earth technologies, which deploy enhanced environmental monitoring via combinations of information and communication technologies (ICT), conventional monitoring technologies (e.g. remote sensing), and Internet of Things (IoT) applications (e.g. Environmental Sensor Networks (ESNs)). This paper presents a systematic meta-review of Smart Earth scholarship, focusing our analysis on the potential implications and pitfalls of Smart Earth technologies for environmental governance. We present a meta-review of academic research on Smart Earth, covering 3187 across the full range of academic disciplines from 1997 to 2017, ranging from ecological informatics to the digital humanities. We then offer a critical perspective on potential pathways for evolution in environmental governance frameworks, exploring five key Smart Earth issues relevant to environmental governance: data; real-time regulation; predictive management; open source; and citizen sensing. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research directions and trans-disciplinary conversations about environmental governance in a Smart Earth world.

Environmental governance: A practical framework to guide design, evaluation, and analysis

AbstractGovernance is one of the most important factors for ensuring effective environmental management and conservation actions. Yet, there is still a relative paucity of comprehensive and practicable guidance that can be used to frame the evaluation, design, and analysis of systems of environmental governance. This conceptual review and synthesis article seeks to addresses this problem through resituating the broad body of governance literature into a practical framework for environmental governance. Our framework builds on a rich history of governance scholarship to propose that environmental governance has four general aims or objectives – to be effective, to be equitable, to be responsive, and to be robust. Each of these four objectives need to be considered simultaneously across the institutional, structural, and procedural elements of environmental governance. Through a review of the literature, we developed a set of attributes for each of these objectives and relate these to the overall capacity, functioning, and performance of environmental governance. Our aim is to provide a practical and adaptable framework that can be applied to the design, evaluation, and analysis of environmental governance in different social and political contexts, to diverse environmental problems and modes of governance, and at a range of scales.

Reproducing vulnerabilities in agri‐food systems: Tracing the links between governance, financialization, and vulnerability in Europe post 2007–2008

AbstractInterconnected sets of vulnerabilities have emerged in the European food system since 2007–2008, raising concerns about food security in a region with arguably some of the most advanced and prosperous economies and environmental governance frameworks. Historically, this is suggesting the current “double jeopardy” problem in food system vulnerability—with systemic declines both in sustainability (the ability of the food system to ecologically renew itself) and food security (the ability of a population to access sufficient nutritional foods and feed itself). By focusing on both drivers and impacts of food system vulnerabilities in the European Union and United Kingdom, this paper explores a grounded and relational approach to financialization—recognized as a key expression of recent growing vulnerabilities. Through the prism of the current socio‐economic pressures facing food producers, and the emergence of potentially “stranded assets” in the agri‐food system more generally, the analysis seeks to show how the combined relationships between neo‐liberalized governance and the market volatilities encouraged by new rounds of financialization are creating “nested” vulnerabilities. As we conclude, a critical, grounded, and systemic understanding of food system vulnerabilities thus becomes a key feature and precursor for potentially developing more resilient agri‐food systems—both regionally and globally.

Governance, Politics, and Environmentalism in the Age of Mass Recreation: The Campaign Against ‘Village Lake Louise’

This article examines the successful environmental campaign against a massive ski resort development proposal known as ‘Village Lake Louise’ that was to be established in the 1970s in Banff National Park, Canada. Using postmaterialism and governance as conceptual lenses, the article presents this campaign as an early example of an environmental conflict that did not centre on primary resource extraction industries, for example forestry, mining, or hydroelectric development. At issue in this case was a growing recreation-based economy that drew on and reflected many of the same postmaterial values and perspectives that informed the environmentalists opposed to the project. In the process, the article demonstrates how the campaign against Village Lake Louise contributed to the institutionalisation of Canada’s environmental movement and to the development of a complex framework for environmental governance in that nation.

Governing Dispossession: Relational Land Grabbing in Laos

The government of (post)socialist Laos has conceded more than 1 million hectares of land—5 percent of the national territory—to resource investors, threatening rural community access to customary lands and forests. However, investors have not been able to use all of the land granted to them, and their projects have generated geographically uneven dispossession due to local resistance. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article compares how dispossession materialized in eight villages targeted by a Vietnamese rubber plantation and a Chinese pulpwood plantation in southern Laos. I contribute to a nascent literature on the political contingencies of dispossession by showing how extraeconomic forces of expropriation are governed relationally. Developing a Gramscian relational environmental governance framework, I demonstrate how such contingencies are shaped by social and political relations among and internal to state, capital, and community actors, leading to either the extension and solidification or contraction and fragmentation of dispossession as a hegemonic mode of development. In the case at hand, I focus on four sets of decisive relations: (1) corporate–state relations that mediate the capacity of investors to mobilize state powers of land expropriation; (2) the state's discursive framing of socioenvironmental relations between communities and their rural environments, which affects how amenable village territories are to acquisition; (3) community–government relations built on kinship, ethnic, or historical links that villagers can use to lodge effective grievances with the state; and (4) coherent and democratic internal village relations that build community solidarity against plantation development. Key Words: dispossession, environmental governance, land grabbing, Laos, resistance.

The Role of Ethics and Targets in Environmental Governance and the Enduring Importance of New Public Management

This article examines the importance of new public management in environmental governance. In order to explain what makes new public management such a robust framework for environmental governance, the article draws on the key themes of individual and collective responsibility in responding to climate change, examining the role of new public management in response to ecological and environmental change, resource scarcity, focus on global energy sources and politics. The article discusses the role of three aspects of environmental governance in turn: the theoretical understandings relating to individuals and society in response to climate change, the politics of these responses and governance arrangements, and how these are formed by the hastening paucity of certain energy resources. The article then moves on to examine these themes in the context of new public management, arguing that the responses we see to climate change in environmental governance are driven by measurement and targets, as these can be universally set and communicated. This shows the enduring nature of new public management in political and policy responses to the challenges of climate change. Bradshaw B (2014) Global Energy Dilemmas. Cambridge: Polity Press. Christensen C and Lægreid P (eds) (2011) The Ashgate Research Companion to New Public Management. Surrey: Ashgate. Cripps E (2013) Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Death C (ed.) (2014) Critical Environmental Politics. Abingdon: Routledge.