Realm Of Environmental Policy Research Articles

When talk meets actions – return to commission leadership in EU environmental policy-making with the European Green Deal

ABSTRACT With the Green Deal, the von der Leyen Commission has put forward an ambitious agenda to transform the European Union towards climate neutrality. However, this commitment to environmental and climate policy has been tested by the numerous crises that have shaped her tenure. Historically, previous Commissions have often deprioritized environmental policy in times of crisis. In light of this, we examine the Commission’s leadership in the realm of environmental policy. Our analysis demonstrates that both the President and her Executive Vice President provided strong leadership and maintained a clear focus on the Green Deal. We further explore this leadership by examining the Commission’s actions in relation to four key Green Deal policies: the Climate Law, the Battery Regulation, the Methane Regulation, and the Nature Restoration Law. Our findings reveal that the rhetorical commitment to environmental and climate policy has translated into mostly ambitious policy proposals, marking a significant departure from the more restrained environmental ambitions of previous Commissions. This analysis contributes to the body of research on the European Commission’s role in environmental and climate policy, as well as its leadership dynamics.

Democracy, Autocracy, and Everything in Between: How Domestic Institutions Affect Environmental Protection

AbstractAs major global challenges intensify in the twenty-first century, which domestic institutions will best enable countries to take decisive and positive action? This article explores this question in the realm of environmental policy. Scholars and practitioners have long argued that ‘democracy’ yields the best environmental outcomes, but others now maintain that ‘eco-authoritarianism’ may be the best way forward. The author unpacks the theoretical mechanisms behind these debates, and adds important nuance in making three arguments. First, the link between elections and eco-policy depends on what citizens want. Secondly, the relationship between civil liberties protections and environmentalism depends on which actors within society hold power. Finally, political constraints make environmental policy change – be it environmentally friendly or damaging – more difficult. The study empirically tests these arguments and finds strong support for the expectations regarding elections and civil liberties. There is only limited evidence that constraints stymie eco-policy change.

Marxist Commodity Fetishization Encoded In Illusory Environmental Policy

The realm of environmental policy is riddled with issues with regards to method of approach and execution. This contemporary form of environmental policy is demystified through the utilization of a Marxist framework. In particular, the concept of commodity fetishism can be used to illustrate the manner in which modern environmental policy fetters the Global South to the economic survival of the Global North.

Editorial Introduction: Governance, Citizenry, and Methodological Advancement in Policy Research

Editorial Introduction: Governance, Citizenry, and Methodological Advancement in Policy Research

Containing Environmentalism: Risk, Rationality, and Value in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez

ABSTRACTThis article revisits regulatory debates about environmental valuation following the Exxon Valdez oil spill to argue that the spill can be seen as a constitutive moment in the rise of neoliberalism. I show that rationalizing environmental values was not simply about applying market rationality to the natural world, but entailed reexamining the nature of that rationality itself and its relevance to social behavior. I then trace the reverberations of these debates beyond the realm of environmental policy, highlighting an underappreciated legacy of the Valdez: the first credit default swap, executed in response to an unprecedented punitive fine leveled against Exxon. Illuminating the linked histories of environmental valuation, corporate environmentalism, and financialization through that event, I argue that environmental valuation is a political problem through which neoliberal strategies for the governance of life (both human and nonhuman) have been forged.

Missing Inaction: Internalizing Beneficial Omissions

The omission bias has been much discussed in both the legal scholarship and the behavioral scholarship. Scholars have noted that a harm stemming from an omission is preferred over equivalent or lesser harm stemming from action. In this article I would like to highlight a neglected form of omission — a beneficial omission. I argue that an omission bias causes us to downplay social contributions stemming from omissions, even at the policy level. The environmental field is the central arena for beneficial omissions. The legal mechanism I suggest for encouraging beneficial omissions in the environmental field is the negative consumption tax. The negative consumption tax provides a refundable credit to individuals who abstain from a polluting consumption pattern, in contrast to the standard green tax which applies to polluting individuals. In this Article I argue that recognizing and increasing the salience of a contributive omission through a negative consumption tax may have three advantages. First, it may be a more effective mechanism both for internalizing externalities and for enhancing the welfare of the worst-off individuals. Second, it would transform individuals of low socio-economic backgrounds into recognized contributing citizens. Third, it is more likely to gain political currency by passing political-economy barriers.This Article provides three possible applications of the negative consumption tax in the realm of environmental policy: car ownership, air travel, and residential consumption of electricity.

Towards a Sustainable Campus: An Ecological Modernization Perspective

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia is a signatory of the Tallores Declaration and as a role model, has to develop and maintain a sustainable campus. Political modernisation, a central tenet of Ecological Modernisation Theory, has transformed the traditional hierarchical mode of governance into a participatoryform. The focus of political modernisation is the government-industry linkage. The research here adopts a new variant of political modernisation by looking at the government-university linkage. This paper has a two-prong objective. The first objective is to test the applicability of political modernisation on the development of a sustainable campus. The second objective is to develop a quantitative methodology to test the linkages on the impact of the state’s environmental policy and reform on the development of a sustainable campus. The government-university linkage is operationalised via specific variables. Spearman’s correlation is used as ordinal data were obtained. A total of 60 respondents were selected via stratified sampling. The findings of this research show that the new variant of political modernisation in the form of government-university linkage has been proven quantitatively. Positive relationship exists between the state’s formulation of environmental policies cum laws and UKM’s formulation of environmental policy and the utilisation of science and technology. Likewise, the state’s implementation of environmental reform has a positive relationship with the campus environmental support system, the utilisation of science and technology and the creation or investment in environmental infrastructure by UKM. This also shows that the realm of environmental policy has moved into the implementation stage.

The Institutional Design of Open Source Programming: Implications for Addressing Complex Public Policy and Management Problems

Recently, an exciting approach to solving complex problems has evolved out of computer science, called Open Source programming. In open source software development settings, programmers freely share their intellectual property ? their readable programming source code ? over the Internet. Some open source endeavors have resulted in very complex, high-quality software products, of which the best-known are the Linux operating system and the Apache Web server. A great advantage of an Internet-based open source approach is its potential to achieve global collective action toward developing robust solutions to complex programming problems. This paper argues that open source has potential application beyond computer programming. Open source principles could potentially be applied to almost any intellectual endeavor, and may be a very important innovation toward harnessing global collaboration toward solving complex public policy and management problems. Little research has been published outlining the details of how successful open source programming endeavors are achieved, such as how projects are initiated and organized over time, what rules for participation have been established, and how the methods for maintaining versions of new submissions have been managed. The institutional designs and management of open source projects could be critical for ensuring participants' willingness to collaborate and for recruiting new team members. This paper and the research program it describes, attempts to address this gap. It provides a summary of the "life cycle" of open source programming projects based on existing literature that is largely focused on high-profile open source projects like Linux and Apache Web Server. It then provides interim results from an on-going study of the institutional designs of open source programming projects. It concludes by presenting some examples of non-programming projects that are beginning to apply open source or licensing principles in areas outside of programming and by presenting an example of how these principles might be applied to complex problems beyond programming in the realm of environmental policy and management.

Environmental (De-) Regulation, Competition, and Policy Rules

This article analyzes some problems regarding our knowledge of environmental policy. Sustainable development as the prospective enlargement of the political agenda has been identified as a long-term challenge for economic policy which could get trapped in a new form of interventionism. The evolutionary market approach that is presented here focuses on development risks of environmental policy that are mostly neglected in standard theory. A transfer of the Hayekian concept of negative rules to the realm of environmental policy is critically discussed. A straight-forward transfer of Hayek's theory stressing the importance of negative rules cannot be recommended, since even the negative rules carry some development risks in the realm of environmental policy. Some preliminary political consequences are drawn which are appropriate to limit the extension of environmental targets in the future.