Environmental Politics

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

A Política Ambiental Internacional (IEP, em inglês) é um campo de estudos fundamental para o desenvolvimento futuro do sistema internacional. Segundo MITCHELL (2009, p. 1, tradução minha) esta área estuda basicamente "[...] a cooperação e o conflito entre os governos que envolvem a degradação ambiental, o uso de recursos naturais e outros impactos humanos produzidos sobre a Terra, e os esforços para resolvê-los". Por isso, a análise do conjunto de regras internacionais de organismos intergovernamentais (OIG), como o Mercosul, justifica-se pela urgência de rastrear as estratégias ou projetos em voga, ou não. De outra forma, é relevante para descobrir o que tem sido feito para atenuar a interferência nociva de seus partícipes em seus territórios nacionais e, igualmente, no ecossistema como um todo. Desde o início do seu processo de integração, o Mercosul defende o compromisso para com uma "consciência verde". O preâmbulo do seu documento fundacional, o Tratado de Assunção, expressa claramente a preocupação de estabelecer um mercado comum, através da expansão dos mercados internos de cada um dos seus quatro Estados-membros. Mas, "[...] esse objetivo deve ser alcançado mediante o aproveitamento mais eficaz dos recursos disponíveis, a preservação do meio ambiente, o melhoramento das interconexões físicas [...]" (MERCOSUR, 1991). Isso, por sua vez, revela que a preservação do meio ambiente será um valor que deverá ser compartilhado entre seus membros.

Goat farming is an important production sector not only for Greece, but also for other Mediterranean countries, as it contributes to the family economy in rural areas. Despite the importance of goat farming, this sector has experienced economic difficulties due to poor management and increased production costs. The aim of our research is to determine goat farm profitability by surveying goat farmers for revenues, variable costs, and fixed costs of their farms. With the use of Principal Component Analysis, all economic factors contributing to overall production costs are examined, as well as their specific impacts on cost formulation. According to our results, goat farms in Greece are not profitable and they cannot survive without government subsidies. Farm economics and agricultural policies could be leveraged to improve community and environmental outcomes in order for farms to be economically and financially sustainable.

Energy projects may profoundly impact Indigenous peoples. We consider effects of Canada's proposed Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion on the health and food sovereignty of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN) through contamination and impeded access to uncontaminated traditional foods. Federal monitoring and TWN documentation show elevated shellfish biotoxin levels in TWN's traditional territory near the terminus where crude oil is piped. Although TWN restoration work has reopened some shellfish-harvesting sites, pipeline expansion stands to increase health risk directly through rising bioaccumulating chemical toxins as well as through increased hazardous biotoxins. Climate change from increased fossil fuel use, expected via pipeline expansion, also threatens to increase algae blooms through higher temperature and nutrient loading. As the environmental impact assessment process failed to effectively consider these local health concerns in addition to larger impacts of climate change, new assessment is needed attending to linked issues of equity, sustainability and Indigenous food sovereignty.

This is an electronic version of an article published in Environmental Politics Volume 15, Issue 5, 2006, pp.697-712. Abstract This introduction considers three themes that recur across the various contributions to this collection. The first is the nature of borders and how these have been affected by the increase in transnational collective action and the growth in the power of transnational institutions. The second is the distinction between environmental movements and the social movement forms of environmentalism: meaning that not all forms of environmental movement are social movements. The third is the evidence of the diversity of environmentalisms, which leads us to identify three principal kinds of environmental movement, the postmaterial movements strongest in the USA and Australia, the postindustrial movements that are strongest in Europe and the postcolonial movements of the South.

As the world continues to fail to reduce and control global surface temperatures so the use of solar radiation management (SRM) technology is becoming increasingly likely. This article examines whether capable individual states and other actors, unilaterally or in small groups, are – from a moral point of view- permitted to deploy SRM technology from the global commons. To answer this question the article examines Elizabeth L. Chalecki and Lisa L. Ferraris (2018) ‘ just geo-engineering theory’ and Kyle Fruh and Marcus Hedahl’ s (2019) suggestion that unilateral geoengineering is – in certain circumstances – a justified form of self-defence against the unjust ‘war’ that is climate change. Given that the two pairs of authors disagree on a number of key points (including on the all-important issues of who may deploy such technology and under what circumstances) that analysis remains inconclusive. The article ventures to answer these and other resultant questions by invoking Just Securitization Theory (Floyd, 2019). It finds that from this perspective unilateral deployment of SRM is not merely morally permissible (provided all criteria are satisfied) but that such action may – in future – even be morally required. Echoing Fruh et al (2019) however this research is not an endorsement for SRM use, but rather a warning of what will happen - indeed will need to happen - unless concrete climate action is taken now.

Вперше у вітчизняній історіографії здійснено комплексне дослідження етапу становлення екологічної політики США, який тривав з кінця XIX ст. до Другої світової війни. Розглянуто чинники зростання інтересу американського суспільства до охорони
природних ресурсів, підґрунтя та засади урядової діяльності в цій царині. Виявлено особливості природоохоронної політики США за часів президентства Теодора Рузвельта, Говарда Тафта, Вудро Вільсона, Воррена Гардінга, Калвіна Куліджа, Герберта Гувера, Франкліна Рузвельта. Розкрито роль лідерів у захисті довкілля
Сполучених Штатів Америки. Охарактеризовано головні етапи діяльності Служби національних парків США. Проаналізовано особливості природоохоронної діяльності під час «прогресивної епохи», доби «проспериті», економічної кризи і рецесії 1930-х рр.
Розкрито екологічні аспекти «Нового курсу» та ефективність використання довкілля в якості антикризового інструменту.
Оцінено теоретичні і практичні здобутки екологічної політики США напередодні Другої світової війни.
Монографія адресована науковцям, викладачам навчальних закладів, політикам, студентам, та всім тим, хто цікавиться екологічною історією та історією Сполучених Штатів Америки і прагне зробити свій внесок у покращення екологічної політики
України.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the importance of solving
environmental problems is no longer in doubt. It is hardly possible to find a country that doesn’t suffer from global climate changes today, the
consequences of which lead to increasing number of victims of floods,
hurricanes, high temperatures and droughts; lack of fresh water; serious
changes in the food production; increasing vulnerability of ecosystems; the threat of flooding of small island countries and some cities. For decades, countries around the world have been working together to overcome environmental problems, and especially the effects of global warming. At the same time, an important part of this problem is the national level of environmental protection. As Ukraine has many environmental problems and its environmental policy is still in a stage of formation it is extremely important to analyze the best foreign experience and the possibilities that it gives with local specifics.
The United States is a major player in the international arena and leader
in world economic development; its approaches to solving environmental problems determine the effectiveness of the entire world community.
However, the vision of ways to overcome the global environmental crisis in the United States is contradictory (for example, the country withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Climate Agreement). Meanwhile, in the late nineteenth- early twenties centuries it became one of the first countries in the world that started a policy of environmental protection and conservation of national resources. Many positive achievements in this area haven’t lost its relevance even nowadays.
It is considered, that the beginning of the environmental movement in the United States is publication "Silent Spring" in 1962 by the biologist of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service R. Carson, in which she substantiated the detrimental harmful effects of pesticides on nature and death of many species of flora and fauna. Spring without birds chirping and singing, made not only citizens, but also policymakers and businessmen all over the world to think about the future of our planet. This book has influenced on formation of powerful environmental movement and stimulated actions around the world.
In the United States of America, a new era of environmental policy
started. It marked by establishment EPA (United States Environmental
Protection Agency) and adoption in the 1970s a number of laws that
regulated different aspects of environmental protection – the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Pesticide Control Act (1972), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (1976) etc. These fundamental changes in attitude towards the environment had led some researchers to believe that the US environmental policy at least given the scale and new quality of the measures started only in 1960 – 1970s.
However, nothing occurs in a vacuum. R. Carson wrote her book in
response to the introduction of the anthropocentric model of nature
management that had developed in the United States in previous decades. The consequences of uncontrolled pollution by pesticides, especially DDT, which considered as an extremely effective after World War II but in fact had led to death of many birds, made her ask the question: what would be next?
The diverse experience of US environmental policy needs to be studied
in more details. In this book we intended to turn to its origins, to consider the formation of philosophical approaches, problems and achievements in environmental protection as well as their peculiarities from the first
environmental steps in the late nineteenth century until the World War II.
During this period a platform was laid, on which a new stage of this policy developed in late 1960s.
This brief insight into US environmental history, particularly in engendering of its nature protection policy, will allow us to understand the role of nature in life of the American nation, the reasons for the emergence of environmental consciousness, the features of the nature model, which largely determine the country's current environmental policy, as well as analyze useful ideas and achievements to avoid possible mistakes in Ukraine.

The only account of the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by somebody who was actually on board. Robie was on board as a journalist for 11 weeks leading up to the sabotage by French secret agents. His media coverage of the Rainbow Warrior affair led to Robie being awarded the New Zealand Media Peace Prize. More than 60 photographs (mostly by the author), cartoons and other illustrations.

In September 2019, the third Global Climate Strike organized by the Fridays For Future (FFF) protest campaign mobilized 6000 protest events in 185 countries and brought 7.6 million participants out onto the streets. This report analyses survey data about participants from 19 cities around the world and compares it to data from an international survey conducted in 13 European cities in March 2019. Both surveys collected data following the well-established “Caught in the Act of Protest” survey methodology in order to generate representative samples. What makes FFF new and particularly interesting is the involvement of schoolchildren and students as initiators, organizers and participants in climate activism on a large scale. The September mobilizations differed from the March events in the explicit call for adults to join the movement. Although older age cohorts were more strongly represented in September, young people continued to make up a substantial portion of the protestors – alm...

This chapter builds on, modifies, and criticizes recent provocative arguments concerning post-political environmental apocalyptic discourses. We develop a notion of contestatory apocalyptics, provide some examples and differences between rightward and progressive apocalyptic contestations. We then outline some of the key examples of a radical apocalyptics and advocate for the emergence of an emancipatory subject capable of crafting alliances with progressive contestatory movements, allowing for a radicalization of the movement as a whole towards post-capitalist politics and ecologies. We conclude by proposing the eco-precariat as a possible name for this emancipatory subject and provide a radical apoclayptics manifesto for the Anthropocene.

Kassirer, S. (2012), Saving Palmachim Beach: Media Representations and Organizational Aspects of a Public Environmental Campaign. Thesis for M.A. degree. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, The Porter School of Environmental Studies. (in Hebrew)

Please contact me if you wish to see a English version of selected chapters.

המאבק על חוף פלמחים: ייצוגים תקשורתיים והיבטים ארגוניים של קמפיין סביבתי-ציבורי.
חיבור זה הוגש כעבודת גמר לקראת תואר מוסמך אוניברסיטה, אוניברסיטת תל אביב, בית ספר פורטר ללימודי הסביבה.
2012

The US environmental movement has borne a number of fruits, from an array of legislative accomplishments to a new, widely commemorated holiday ‐ Earth Day. Theoretical insights based in literatures on symbolic politics, collective memory, political socialisation, and the sociology of time suggest that the regular observance of this holiday inserts environmental values into the national consciousness on a regular basis, socializes children and adults, and unobtrusively legitimizes environmental interest groups. However, Earth Day demonstrates the US environmental movement's limitations and problems. A number of environmental groups consider the holiday's very popularity to be its own undoing, as corporate and business groups use Earth Day as an opportunity to define themselves as supportive of the environment. Drawing from textual sources and a survey of US environmental group leaders and staff, this article demonstrates how the holiday has proved to be a mixed legacy, reflecting the schisms permeating American environmentalism.

Energy poverty remains a challenged concept without firm establishment in public policy on a national and international level. This paper addresses those still skeptical about the very idea of energy poverty and provides arguments to defend the concept against fundamental criticism. First, it is shown why energy poverty should be conceptualized, measured and tackled as a specific form of poverty. Secondly, conceptual confusions surrounding the concept are clarified, in particular the relation to fuel poverty and the difference between energy poverty definitions, measures and indicators. Further, a needs-based understanding of energy poverty is outlined.

Does capitalism generate prosperity and well-being in an atmosphere of freedom, as its defenders claim, or is it an unjust system in which workers are exploited for the benefit of a capital-owning minority, as its critics assert? Does capitalism lead inexorably to greater inequality, or does it have mechanisms that in the long run reduce inequalities? Do capitalist markets regulate themselves and manage to overcome the difficulties and turbulences generated by their functioning, or, on the contrary, do they lead to increasingly serious crises which, in one way or another, will lead to their collapse or their replacement by another social system? Beyond these dichotomies, which sketch a black and white world, this book explores the diversity of capitalisms, with all their colors, shades and nuances. Instead of repeating the discussion about whether capitalism is good or bad, it is about changing the questions: How diverse can capitalism be? Why do capitalisms differ? What factors provoke their transformations? What are the scope and limits of this form of economic and social organization? These and other questions are the
questions animate this work, which takes as its starting point a polemic thesis: other capitalisms are possible.

This detailed and intellectually rigorous text is the fruit of nine years of study by Caroline Gatt, outlining her ethnographic account of the international environmental movement through a study of Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Friends of the Earth International (FoEI).

This project is an attempt to produce a graphic, interactive and global history of modern environmentalism. It connects key people, ideas, movements and case studies to show the connections between different strains of environmental activism over time and space. Originally developed as a Prezi presentation for a course in global environmental history, the “incomplete” in the title refers to both the project’s current status as a work- in-progress, but also to the unfinished nature of the history of environmentalism. Our primary narrative of environmental activism is Western-centric, white and top down, which has pushed the concerns of the poor, racial and ethnic minorities and subalterns to the margins. Environmentalism is a global story, but much of it is a story that has not been told. The goal of this project is to encourage both academics and laypeople to consider and construct a history of environmentalism that is decentered, and both top down and bottom up.

The project is best viewed on Prezi: http://prezi.com/de2b2rkfrg-v/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

The Green Party should be able to outline the contours of the future ecological society and map the path leading in its direction. This means translating principles, evidence and institutional and technical capacity into programmes and policies. In addition to initiatives at the political level, there is the importance of direct experience in mobilising action at the social level. The invisibility or intangibility of a problem is a serious issue. People are motivated and will act when they can see a connection between inputs and outputs, tangible results for practical efforts. The problem is that if people do not seen or feel a problem directly, it is difficult to persuade them that a response is necessary. This points to the need to innovate practices, institutions and policy frameworks which could help create the mentalities and modalities in which people are moved to change their lives. The abstruse issue and long range goal needs to be given a practical, tangible focus, brought into the here and now as an ecological and a cognitive praxis.

The question of political solutions to the environmental crisis is not a matter of formulating the right policy in line with existing political institutions, but of establishing new rules – a new regulatory regime or framework based on new principles for the direction and social use of production, new habits. A new mode of regulation which is built on new hopes and new projects.

This report argues that policy must be based on a number of key principles - policy must be effective, evidence based, experiential, efficient, and equitable.

This paper presents a retrospective of the changes in Brazilian speleological legislation and how it has created conflict with respect to the protection of speleological heritage. Pondering the role of civil society and questioning the constitutionality of the decree 6.640/2008, it presents a historical overview of the protests against legislation that have created setbacks for speleological heritage. This paper also highlights the need for an open dialogue to find ways to protect natural heritage while also developing socially and environmentally sustainable economic activities.

City-based citizenship (city-zenship) and its ecological ramifications increasingly inform people’s social and political lives, rendering the link between ecological citizenship and political city-zenship a topical subject for analysis. The questions analyzed here are: How can and how do citizens of cities promote sustainable urban development? What are their goals and motivations? And how do these forms of engagement reflect the theory of ecological citizenship in cities? The research is based on semi-structured and in-depth interviews with environmental and political activists in German and Israeli cities. The analysis indicates that the city is a meaningful political arena for ecological citizenship, with distinct patterns of political participation in relation to a city’s particular identity. However, political participation in cities is not independent of the state, but dependent on the political and civic rights enshrined therein.

Czy ochrona środowiska może stanowić fundament dla pokojowego współżycia społeczności w rejonach konfliktu? Bazując na koncepcji zaawansowanego zapobiegania konfliktom (ACP) uznajemy, że taka sytuacja jest możliwa dzięki (często ukrytym) mechanizmom desekurytyzacji i depolityzacji jakie wiążą się z zacieśnianiem współpracy ekologicznej na poziomie transnarodowym. Staramy się odpowiedzieć na to pytanie poprzez analizę doświadczeń pozarządowej organizacji Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), działającej na terenie Izraela, Jordanii i Autonomii Palestyńskiej i będącej jedyną trójstronną organizacją ekologiczną w tym regionie. Korzystając z materiałów tej organizacji, wywiadów oraz dostępnych wypowiedzi kluczowych aktorów politycznych, staramy się prześledzić proces desekurytyzacji i pokazać w jakich warunkach jest on możliwy.

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to the metaphor of the perfect moral storm and its application to climate change. It sketches each of the main elements of the stormits global, intergenerational and theoretical dimensions-and also the resulting problem of moral corruption. It also examines some exacerbating features of the climate case, such as scientific uncertainty, the skewed vulnerability of those least responsible, and the creation of new victims and tragic choices. These matters are taken up in more detail in later chapters.

For many contemporary media celebrities, the environment—and in particular, climate change—is the new black. One cursory gaze across the global media-scape confirms this: Leonardo DiCaprio has produced and starred in Before the Flood (2016) which tells the tales of his journey as the UN Ambassador of Peace to engage powerful leaders about climate change. This, of course, was preceded by his widely publicised Best Actor speech at the Oscars where he made an impassioned plea for the audience to be concerned about climate change, public procrastination and inequality. Olivia Munn, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jessica Alba witness and ‘emote’ for audiences about the impacts of climate change across the world on ordinary people and ecologies in the television programme Years of Living Dangerously (2014). Mark Ruffalo writes a series of prominent columns about fracking, solar power and clear air and water in the Huffington Post, the Millennial ‘newspaper’ of record. Even ‘public intellectual’ celebrities such as Naomi Klein are getting in the act: She has starred in—along with her six-year old son—an online short film put together by the UK’s Guardian newspaper entitled Under the Surface that shows the impacts of climate change on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. For her, discussing her emotional responses to climate change and introducing her son in the film, worked as a way for her to ‘communicate in a visceral way, the intergenerational theft at the heart of this crisis’ (Klein, 2016). Environmental politics, with this celebritization and media-isation of climate change and other ecological issues, has gone spectacular. Celebrities, as our witnesses and muses, now speak very loudly for and about the environment in increasingly important ways that have impacts on what we know about Nature, how we feel about it and what we should do to ‘save’ it. In this era of global environmental change, environmental celebrities have positioned themselves as increasingly powerful and politicised meditators of our increasingly fraught human-environment relationship.

This paper seeks to critically assess how "radical" sustainability approaches that challenge "mainstream" development trajectories-and politics-are crafted and contested within local government. We explore the extent to which these approaches account for a consolidation, break down or transformation of role boundaries and political identities and their implications for the politics of niche-regime dynamics. In our in-depth study of Independents for Frome (Somerset, UK), an "independent" group who took control of the town council in 2011 and consolidated a non-partisan approach within its administrative functions, referred to as its "Flatpack Democracy" model, we take a closer look at adversarialism and the intersection of power dynamics within local government. The findings reveal the capture of local mainstream political institutions by niche "protagonists" through an orchestration and consolidation of transition governance, woven in strategically and opportunistically into new forms of localized political identities at the niche-regime interface, which helped to create a community-level regime of transition governance. We suggest that informal institutional capital, such as the role of personal ties can impact on legitimacy, accountability, or the validation of sustainability agendas. Our findings also advance debates on transition thresholds within "liminal transition spaces", interstitial spaces between a previous way of knowing and doing, and a new way. Here ground rules dictating socio-political norms are unclear, collaborative actions are potentially working at cross-purposes and/or multiple forms of (transformative) power are exercised simultaneously at distinct moments, or instantiations of transition. That is, there remains a much-needed theoretical debate around the fragile and imperfect processes of democratization within the everyday politics of transition management.

In this annotated bibliography towards the development of environmental politics, looking at issues of justice, Iris Young's Responsibility for Justice, argues that we should think about personal responsibility in relation to social justice. Whereas, Michael Sandel's  Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, discusses what makes a just and moral society in today's free-market. On economics, Ernest Schumacher's Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered gives an alternative view to economics which feature in today's free-market. Whereas, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism address how in today's free-market, disaster capitalism has destroyed peoples lives for the benefit for others. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger looks at whether health and social problems in some developed countries are related to income inequality. Michael Maniates' Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World, argues that by individualising responsibility on issues of environmentalism, this has restricted peoples “environmental imagination”.

This article examines China's rapid and large-scale renewable energy expansion and the challenge it presents to orthodox approaches to sustainable energy diffusion that emphasise soft interventions and stakeholder participation. We show that China eschewed participatory modes of energy governance and pursued a centrally steered, hard interventionist strategy adapted to its non-democratic regime. We observe that China's approach provides an alternative blueprint for development that is potentially attractive to some audiences. Drawing on recent soft power debates, we argue that China's hard interventionist mode of governance in the renewables sector has the potential to enhance Chinese soft power both domestically and abroad.

How do societies negotiate the apparently competing agendas of environmental protection and social justice? Why do some countries perform much better than others on this front?

Democracy in the Woods addresses these question by examining land rights conflicts--and the fate of forest-dependent peasants--in the context of the different forest property regimes in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. These three countries are prominent in the scholarship and policy debates about national forest policies and land conflicts associated with international support for nature conservation. This unique comparative study of national forestland regimes challenges the received wisdom that redistributive policies necessarily undermine the goals of environmental protection. It shows instead that the form that national environmental protection efforts take--either inclusive (as in Mexico) or exclusive (as in Tanzania and, for the most part, in India)--depends on whether dominant political parties are compelled to create structures of political intermediation that channel peasant demands for forest and land rights into the policy process. This book offers three different tests of this theory of political origins of forestland regimes. First, it explains why it took the Indian political elites nearly sixty years to introduce meaningful reforms of the colonial-era forestland regimes. Second, it successfully explains the rather counterintuitive local outcomes of the programs for formalization of land rights in India, Tanzania, and Mexico. Third, it provides a coherent explanation of why each of these three countries proposes a significantly different distribution of the benefits of forest-based climate change mitigation programs being developed under the auspices of the United Nations.

In its political analysis of the control over and the use of nature, this book opens up new avenues for reflecting on how legacies of the past and international interventions interject into domestic political processes to produce specific configurations of environmental protection and social justice. Democracy in the Woods offers a theoretically rigorous argument about why and in what specific ways politics determine the prospects of a socially just and environmentally secure world.

Problems of elite capture continue to present challenges for sustainable and equitable forest governance around the world. Our understanding of elite capture, however, remains limited by conceptual approaches that pay insufficient attention to power in its various dimensions. Drawing on critical insti-tutionalism and political ecology, I analyze how the power veiled in political-economic structures or 'power fields', embedded with local institutions and relations of conflict and negotiation, helps (re)pro-duce elite power and persistence. I pay particular attention to the role of foresters as crucial yet under-studied elite actors in community forestry. I employ an overtime comparative case study of processes of elite capture in four regional inter-community forestry associations (FAs) in the state of Durango, Mexico. I argue that foresters' persistent capture of FAs is related to multi-layered power inequalities and persistent democratic deficits reproduced by techno-bureaucratic forestry and authoritarian corporatist logics. At the same time, I posit that this capture is not definite but is continually transformed by social struggles and grassroots institutional innovations.

The expansion of renewables is still dependent on appropriate policy support. Yet, in the wake of the economic crisis, even pioneer European countries have begun to dismantle the set of measures implemented in the past decades. Policy dismantling in the area of renewable energy is a recent phenomenon that has attracted little attention in comparison to the study of the diffusion of support schemes. By focusing on the dismantling of renewable energy policy in Italy, this contribution aims to help fill this gap and to highlight an important aspect of the current politics of energy transition. It shows how policy dismantling is affected by the interactions between the political economy of the renewable energy sector, policy design, institutional constraints and external events. It also demonstrates the role of self-undermining mechanisms and framing effects in the dismantling of renewable energy policy.

The intellectual debate between green political economy and neo-classical economics is one that lies partly within the framework of the academic production of knowledge, but is also a debate that goes far beyond the academy. This is also an ideological battle, only part of which occurs within the academy. Neo-classical economics supports a particular view of the economy and society, one which, with a few exceptions, is supportive of a capitalist organization of the economy, private ownership of the means of production, and production for profit; justifies an unequal distribution of income and wealth; promotes free trade, deregulation, and economic globalization; and above all is committed to promoting orthodox economic growth. By orthodox 'economic growth” is meant “undifferentiated, monetary/GDP measurements of economic growth as a permanent feature of the economy” (Barry 2012). In short, neo-classical economics supports the prevailing capitalist status quo, yet does not make this explicit, and therefore underpins actually
existing unsustainability: neo-classical economics sustains the unsustainable.

Post-normal science (PNS) is presented by its proponents as a new way of doing science that deals with uncertainties, value diversity or antagonism, and high decision stakes and urgency, with the ultimate goal of remedying the pathologies of the global industrial system for which, according to Funtowicz and Ravetz (1993, 739) existing science forms the basis. We critically examine whether PNS can fulfil this claim in the light of empirical and theoretical work on politics and policymaking. We credit PNS as innovative frontrunner in raising important issues regarding the limited problem-solving capacity of ‘normal science’ and ‘professional consultancy’. Yet, we notice that PNS lacks important considerations about the governance of problems  and aspects of participatory and deliberative democracy. PNS in effect implies that methodological ‘ratiocination’ would prevail over political deliberation and democratic interaction, and that merely changing scientific input in public policymaking would have the power to change its outcomes. This scientistic hubris can be traced back to PNS’ origin in concerned scientists’ activism, which in effect accessed the political arena through the scientific entrance. We conclude that the art of politics needs to come back into the discussion on environmental problems if societal change is to occur.

This paper examines local sustainability concepts in Connemara, a predominantly rural region in the West of Ireland, to show how they are (re-)constituted through people’s interactions with social and biophysical environments. We argue that these interactions produce diverse forms of lay environmental knowledge and expertise that encompass cognitive and emotional aspects, a fact that is frequently ignored in environmental policy-making which prioritises rational arguments over reactions rooted in people’s sense of place and community. Local people’s responses to this dominance of “official” rational-technical sustainability concepts are central to recent cases of environmental controversy and lack of compliance to environmental policies that have characterised the study area but that show many parallels to conflicts and disputes elsewhere. Drawing on rich qualitative evidence from interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper demonstrates how communities’ responses to environmental policies depend on how well (or poorly) sustainability concepts underpinning these policies match local people’s social-ecological practices and related place-specific views of what should be sustained.

Keywords: lay knowledge; sustainability; expertise; environmental policy; Connemara; Ireland

In its immediate aftermath the Eastern European revolution of 1989 was interpreted as a ‘rectifying revolution’: the experiment of 1917 had been cast off, liberal institutions were copied from the West and no new ideas were launched. Subsequent debate has gone some way in challenging this, suggesting that 1989 at least launched historically distinct political methods but lacked novel utopias or critiques of dominant political and economic paradigms. Such interpretations have overlooked that dissidents and protest movements across Eastern Europe also relied widely on a strong environmental critique of industrial society, expansionary economics and instrumental reason. More specifically, many of the human rights and democracy movements began as, or meshed with, environmentalist organizations, and from very early on dissidents linked their non-violent and anti-authoritarian strategies of resistance to explicitly environmentalist critiques of industrialism. This article argues that although overshadowed by human rights and demands for political reform, environmentalism was a significant feature of the revolutionary process in the ways it allowed dissidents to critique socialist as well as capitalist systems, provided a focus to the idea of civil society and tapped into a wider emerging globalist political narrative in which the limits of the Earth and of rationalist control over it were made increasingly apparent.

Outlines the main features of direct action. It covers its links to radical ideologies and its intersections and differences with civil disobedience, constitutional action and symbolic action. It addresses criticisms of direct action from liberal constitutionalists like John Plamenatz and Sidney Hook and more instrumentalobjections from green thinkers like  Avner de Shalit and the utilitarian environmental philosopher, Peter Singer. This is a slightly longer version than the final published version.

An  issue  that  engaged  the  alternative  music  movement  in  1970s  Sweden  was  what  “political  music”  could  be.  In  hindsight,  the  movement  has  often  been  associated  with  political  dogmatism,  orthodox  marxism and narrow-minded sectarianism. However, the music movement and its forerunners in the form and genre experiments of the latter Sixties reveal other ways of approaching the political. Through the close reading of in-depth interviews, magazines, media and record albums, this article demonstrates how three related bands associated  to  flumprogg  (“fuzzy/hazy  progg”)  formulated  a  critique  of  an  anthropocentric  worldview  where  Man is supposed to overexploit nature. This critique, I argue, can be seen as shaping a cosmological dimension to the cognitive praxis of the emerging alternative music movement, later to be dominated by a focus on organ-izational dimensions.

O  tema  central  do  presente  ensaio  versa  sobre  a  mudança  climática  e  seu  impacto  na  agricultura  e  pecuária  brasileira  e  argentina,  espe-cialmente no que respeita à geopolítica da mudança climática e a produção de alimentos. A metodologia de trabalho foi a análise crítica de documentos  e  legislações  que  dão  o  suporte  ao  atual  modelo  de  desenvolvimento  da  agricultura  e  pecuária  nos  monocultivos  de  grande extensão, com o objetivo de compreender o alcance da adoção de práticas voltadas para a produtividade de quantitativos e o abandono da dimensão qualitativa do modelo de desenvolvimento. O enfoque da sustentabilidade emerge no texto como princípio norteador da análise e  como  objetivo  a  ser  buscado  e  trabalhado  como  resultado  de  práticas  que  devem  ser  introduzidas  como  condição sine  qua  non  para  a  mitigação dos impactos da mudança climática e processos de adaptação. As possíveis conclusões apontam para a necessidade de mudanças na  racionalidade  econômica  e  adoção  de  práticas  identificadas  com  a  racionalidade  ambiental,  que  primem  por  atender  às  necessidades alimentares da região, comprometidas com o bem-estar das gerações presentes e futuras, promovendo sustentabilidade.

This book addresses a central dilemma facing efforts to promote environmental sustainability: while environmental challenges including climate change threaten the very fabric of our lives, ambitious efforts to address these rarely resonate with the everyday concerns and ideas most pressing to citizens.  The book analyzes both the opportunities and constraints facing such efforts to promote environmental sustainability. I first theorize an approach to “contested materiality” and then draw upon this to engage values embedded in everyday practices – including land use, automobility, and householding – in affluent postindustrial societies.  The aim is to open up new ways of thinking about property, freedom, and citizenship that might foster a more resonant and expansive political imagination.