Linking global and local scales: designing dynamic assessment and management processes

This paper identifies challenges inherent in addressing multi-scale environmental problems, and outlines tentative guidelines for addressing such challenges and linking science and policy across scales. The study and practice of environmental assessment and management increasingly recognize the importance of scale and cross-scale dynamics in understanding and addressing global environmental change. These ongoing efforts, however, lack a systematic way of thinking about and addressing the challenges involved in integrating science and policy across multiple scales, for example, in the design of policy-relevant, scientific assessments of problems such as climate change. These challenges include matching scales of biogeophysical systems with scales of management systems, avoiding scale discordance (matching the scale of the assessment with the scale of management), and accounting for cross-scale dynamics. In this paper we propose tentative guidelines for meeting such challenges for both assessors and decision-makers: (1) utilize boundary organizations — institutions which serve to mediate between scientists and decision-makers, and between these actors at different scales; (2) utilize scale-dependent comparative advantages — coordinating the allocation of resources, technical expertise, and decision-making authority to best capitalize on scale-specific capabilities; and (3) employ adaptive assessment and management strategies — constructing long-term, iterative, experiment-based processes of integrated assessment and management.     

Racing climate change: Collaboration and conflict in California's global climate change policy arena

Media accounts routinely refer to California's Assembly Bill 32 (AB 32), the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, as “landmark” climate change legislation. On its surface, this label is an accurate reflection of the state's forward-thinking stance across many environmental issues including pesticides, toxic substances, solid waste, and air quality. For all its promise, however, AB 32 can also be considered a low point in the landscape of conflict between state environmental regulators and California's environmental justice movement. While the legislation included several provisions to address the procedural and distributive dimensions of environmental justice, the implementation of AB 32 has been marked by heated conflict. The most intense conflicts over AB 32 revolve around the primacy of market mechanisms such as “cap and trade.” This article examines the drivers and the manifestations of these dynamics of collaboration and conflict between environmental justice advocates and state regulators, and pays particular attention to the scalar and racialized quality of the neoliberal discourse. The contentiousness of climate change politics in California offers scholars and practitioners around the world a cautionary tale of how the best intentions for integrating environmental justice principles into climate change policy do not necessarily translate into implementation and how underlying racialized fractures can upend collaboration between state and social movement actors.     

Domestic politics and the diffusion of international policy innovations: How does accommodation happen?

What happens to policy innovations after they have been adopted? What factors account for subsequent changes to these policies? These are the research questions guiding this study on the spread of and subsequent changes to limit values for nitrogen oxide emissions from large combustion plants. By comparing the processes of diffusion and follow-up policy changes, we assess whether and how policy innovations translate into policy making. In so doing, we build on the literature on the determinants of policy diffusion and transfer. We employ original data on instances of policy adoption and policy change in 24 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over a period of thirty years (1976–2005). The data are analysed using semi-parametric event-history models. Our empirical findings show that both international and domestic factors account for the observed variation in our data regarding both first-time adoptions and post-adoption modifications. The results reveal that the subsequent tightening of emission standards faces greater obstacles than their mere diffusion (i.e., policy adoption). While international factors and supranational integration appear to impede the subsequent tightening of existing policies, international peer pressure is a strong predictor of an on-going regulatory commitment. Overall, adoption and accommodation processes seem to follow distinctive patterns, suggesting that a promising strategy in policy innovation research would involve differentiation between the first-time adoption and subsequent modification of policies.     

Understanding U.S. public support for domestic climate change policies

In the U.S., public support for federal, state and local efforts to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) continues to be a crucial element of the political viability of these proposals. We present a detailed analysis of the reasons given by the general public of Michigan and Virginia for supporting or rejecting a number of policies that could be implemented to meet GHG reductions. The data allow us to analyze the relationships between reasons provided by respondents, social psychological and demographic characteristics, and policy support. This analysis can provide policymakers pragmatic guidance in (1) developing tactics to engage the public that build on current concerns about climate change policies and (2) crafting and communicating policies that garner support from various segments of the public. This analysis also raises theoretical questions regarding the relationship between public discourse on environmental issues and the formation of public policy support. We suggest that future efforts to understand the U.S. dynamics of public support for climate change policies could benefit from understanding the public discursive and the reasoning processes that underlie public opinion formation.     

Scale sensitivity of drivers of environmental change across Europe

The development of effective environmental management plans and policies requires a sound understanding of the driving forces involved in shaping and altering the structure and function of ecosystems. However, driving forces, especially anthropogenic ones, are defined and operate at multiple administrative levels, which do not always match ecological scales. This paper presents an innovative methodology of analysing drivers of change by developing a typology of scale sensitivity of drivers that classifies and describes the way they operate across multiple administrative levels. Scale sensitivity varies considerably among drivers, which can be classified into five broad categories depending on the response of ‘evenness’ and ‘intensity change’ when moving across administrative levels. Indirect drivers tend to show low scale sensitivity, whereas direct drivers show high scale sensitivity, as they operate in a non-linear way across the administrative scale. Thus policies addressing direct drivers of change, in particular, need to take scale into consideration during their formulation. Moreover, such policies must have a strong spatial focus, which can be achieved either by encouraging local–regional policy making or by introducing high flexibility in (inter)national policies to accommodate increased differentiation at lower administrative levels. High quality data is available for several drivers, however, the availability of consistent data at all levels for non-anthropogenic drivers is a major constraint to mapping and assessing their scale sensitivity. This lack of data may hinder effective policy making for environmental management, since it restricts the ability to fully account for scale sensitivity of natural drivers in policy design.     

中国交通行业实施环境经济政策的协同控制效应研究

目前,交通行业已成为中国局地大气污染物和温室气体的重要排放来源之一,而且随着交通运输规模的不断扩大,与工业和生活排放相比,交通排放贡献占比呈相对增加趋势.文中构建了"CGE-CIMS联合模型",对中国交通行业实施环境经济政策的局地大气污染物和CO2协同控制效应进行量化评估.结果显示,与BAU情景相比,环境税、碳税、成品...     

Modelling complex systems of heterogeneous agents to better design sustainability transitions policy

This article proposes a fundamental methodological shift in the modelling of policy interventions for sustainability transitions in order to account for complexity (e.g. self-reinforcing mechanisms, such as technology lock-ins, arising from multi-agent interactions) and agent heterogeneity (e.g. differences in consumer and investment behaviour arising from income stratification). We first characterise the uncertainty faced by climate policy-makers and its implications for investment decision-makers. We then identify five shortcomings in the equilibrium and optimisation-based approaches most frequently used to inform sustainability policy: (i) their normative, optimisation-based nature, (ii) their unrealistic reliance on the full-rationality of agents, (iii) their inability to account for mutual influences among agents (multi-agent interactions) and capture related self-reinforcing (positive feedback) processes, (iv) their inability to represent multiple solutions and path-dependency, and (v) their inability to properly account for agent heterogeneity. The aim of this article is to introduce an alternative modelling approach based on complexity dynamics and agent heterogeneity, and explore its use in four key areas of sustainability policy, namely (1) technology adoption and diffusion, (2) macroeconomic impacts of low-carbon policies, (3) interactions between the socio-economic system and the natural environment, and (4) the anticipation of policy outcomes. The practical relevance of the proposed methodology is subsequently discussed by reference to four specific applications relating to each of the above areas: the diffusion of transport technology, the impact of low-carbon investment on income and employment, the management of cascading uncertainties, and the cross-sectoral impact of biofuels policies. In conclusion, the article calls for a fundamental methodological shift aligning the modelling of the socio-economic system with that of the climatic system, for a combined and realistic understanding of the impact of sustainability policies.     

Technology innovation and diffusion in “less than ideal” climate policies: An assessment with the WITCH model

This paper examines the dynamics of innovation in low-carbon energy technologies distinguishing between research and development and technology diffusion as a response to alternative climate policies. We assess the implications of second-best policies that depart from the assumption of immediate and global participation and of full technology availability. The analysis highlights the heterogeneous effects of climate policy on different energy R&D programs and discusses the contribution of important determinants such as carbon price and policy stringency, policy credibility, policy and technological spillovers and absorptive capacity.     

Navigating the dilemmas of climate policy in Europe: evidence from policy evaluation studies

Climate change is widely recognised as a ‘wicked’ policy problem. Agreeing and implementing governance responses is proving extremely difficult. Policy makers in many jurisdictions now emphasise their ambition to govern using the best available evidence. One obvious source of such evidence is the evaluations of the performance of existing policies. But to what extent do these evaluations provide insights into the difficult dilemmas that governors typically encounter? We address this question by reviewing the content of 262 evaluation studies of European climate policies in the light of six kinds of dilemma found in the governance literature. We are interested in what these studies say about the performance of European climate policies and in their capacity to inform evidence-based policy-making. We find that the evaluations do arrive at common findings: that climate change is framed as a problem of market and/or state failure; that voluntary measures tend to be ineffective; that market-based instruments tend to be regressive; that EU-level policies have driven climate policies in the latecomer EU Member States; and that lack of monitoring and weak enforcement are major obstacles to effective policy implementation. However, we also conclude that the evidence base these studies represent is surprisingly weak for such a high profile area. There is too little systematic climate policy evaluation work in the EU to support systematic evidence-based policy making. This reduces the scope for sound policy making in the short run and is a constraint to policy learning in the longer term.     

When the pendulum doesn’t find its center: Environmental narratives,strategies, and forest policy change in the US Pacific Northwest

Since the 1980s, the US Pacific Northwest has been shattered by a major environmental policy conflict related to the management of Federal forests. These “timber wars” were similar to forest environmental policy conflicts in several other countries, but were particularly polarized. They resulted in a significant change in Federal forest policy from timber production orientation to biodiversity conservation. The change occurred suddenly and had significant economic and social consequences within the region and beyond, but was embedded in long-term societal and institutional trends.In this paper, I adopt an interpretive approach in order to, first, understand contemporary interpretations of the 1993 policy change and, second, to reconstruct the contemporary discursive ‘landscape’ of the Pacific Northwest including the major resource management paradigms and narratives that guide policy making in this region today. Empirically, my interpretation is mostly built on 37 qualitative interviews with policy stakeholders that were conducted in the summer of 2011.Based on this evidence, the paper argues that there are four narratives circulating amongst policy stakeholders that represent different conceptualizations of the 1993 policy change. Yet, all narratives highlight the importance of environmental strategy making that mobilized the socio-institutional setting in order to prepare and finally achieve the change.Current forest policy in the region is characterized by a policy stalemate resulting from the confluence of diverse institutional, context-related factors and the inability of stakeholders to create enough contradictions or crisis by combining these factors in order to promote change-enabling narratives. Four resource management paradigms compete in the region and, within these, narratives and counter narratives on physical and social events are developed. Current forest policy is dominated by an ecosystem management paradigm, but forest management practices aim to reconcile demands arising from the different paradigms to a certain degree, for instance via the concept of “ecological restoration”. Yet, given that the material base that feeds such compromises is finite, a new crisis in Pacific Northwest forest policy in the future is likely.In conclusion, this paper offers an interpretation of Pacific Northwest forest policy (change) as a process in which social and physical events are ‘discursively mobilized’ by means of narratives that are produced against the background of major natural resources paradigms. This includes the art of ‘discourse agents’ in constructing problematizations and intervention logics to either defend the current policy state or to increase the likelihood of change.     

Carbon forestry in West Africa: The politics of models,measures and verification processes

In a context of neo-liberal environmental governance, imperatives for global climate change mitigation are motivating a new round of policy initiatives and projects aimed at carbon forestry: conserving and enhancing forest carbon stocks, and trading these values in emerging carbon markets. In this context modelling and measurement, always significant in framing and justifying forest policy initiatives, are of renewed importance, with a growing array of protocols focused on counting and accounting for forest carbon as a commodity. This article draws on perspectives from science and technology studies and environmental discourse analysis to explore how these modelling and measurement processes are being co-constructed with forest carbon policies and political economies, and applied in project design in local settings. Document analysis and key informant interviews are used to track and illustrate these processes in a pair of case studies of forest carbon projects in Sierra Leone and Ghana. These are chosen to highlight different project types – focused respectively on forest reserve and farm-forestry – in settings with multi-layered histories of people-forest relations, landscape change and prior project intervention. The analysis shows how longer established framings and assessments of deforestation are being re-invoked and re-worked amidst current carbon concerns. We demonstrate that measurement processes are not just technical but social and political, carrying and thus cementing particular views of landscape and social relations that in turn make likely particular kinds of intervention pathway, with fortress style conservation or plantations becoming the dominant approach. In the process, other possibilities – including alternative pathways that might treat and value carbon as part of complex, lived-in landscapes, or respond more adaptively to less equilibrial people–forest relations, are occluded.     

Linking internal and external transformation for sustainability and climate action: Towards a new research and policy agenda

Climate change is an increasing threat to sustainable development worldwide. However, the dominant incremental policy approaches have not generated action at anywhere near the rate, scale or depth that is needed. This is largely due to the fact that climate change has historically been framed as a purely external, technical challenge. There is an urgent need for a more integral understanding that links internal and external (collective and systems) approaches to support transformation. However, related knowledge is scarce and fragmented across disciplines. This study addresses this gap. Through a systematic literature review, we analyse how the linkages between internal and external change are portrayed and understood in current research. We assess the scope, perspectives and approaches used to understand why, and how, internal change relates to climate action and sustainability. Our results highlight patterns and gaps regarding foci, conceptualisation, methods, epistemology, ontology and ethics that hamper emergent solutions and progress. Starting from the status quo, we propose an integrated model of change as an agenda and roadmap for future research, policy and practice.     

Public policy and financial resource mobilization for wind energy in developing countries: A comparison of approaches and outcomes in China and India

We analyze and contrast how China and India mobilized financial resources to build domestic technological innovation systems in wind energy. To that end, we identify distinct stages of technology diffusion in the two countries in the period 1986–2012, and analyze the interplay between public policies and the development of the technological innovation system across the different stages. We show that the two countries’ distinct development strategies for wind energy – China developed wind energy largely through its state-owned enterprises, while India opened up wind energy investment to the private sector in the early 1990s – influenced system outcomes in terms of technology diffusion, domestic industry structure, competitiveness, and ownership. By unraveling the interplay between public policies, investment risks and returns, and actor characteristics, we explain the differences in system outcomes and identify important policy trade-offs between the two strategies. Our analysis provides novel insights about the process of financial resource mobilization in technological innovation systems, the dynamics of innovation-system growth, and the policy trade-offs that must be reconciled by countries that aim to promote the diffusion of a particular technology.     

Climate policy and dynamic efficiency gains A case study on Norwegian CO2-taxes and technological innovation in the petroleum sector

Abstract

Against increasing scientific evidence of human-induced global warming, and prevailing uncertainties regarding the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the use of environmental taxes has been gaining increasing popularity in the OECD region. Economists often conjecture that such instruments provide a continuous incentive for technological innovation, which is likely to be a key determinant for success or failure in climate policy, at least in the long turn. However, there is little empirical evidence available to justify claims of that kind. The objective of this paper is to provide such evidence, by assessing the impacts of Norwegian CO₂-taxes, the key instrument in Norway's climate policy, on technological innovation in upstream petroleum operations. The balance of evidence suggests that the introduction of CO₂-taxes has provided some incentive for innovation that has shifted petroleum operations in a less emission-intensive direction. That said, the pattern of technological change pertains mostly to incremental process innovations, cumulative improvements, and adaptations of technologies already available. These insights may assist policymakers when formulating policy strategies and selecting instruments for climate change mitigation.     

Green growth rhetoric versus reality: Insights from Indonesia

By 2030 Indonesia aims to reduce its CO₂ emissions by 29% while maintaining a 7% annual GDP growth rate, thus making “green economy” a reality. Based on a review of literature and secondary data and interviews with key informants, this article examines the gap between these national ambitions and the reality on the ground, with particular attention to the challenges of multi-scalar environmental governance. It first introduces the green economy concept and discusses the main green growth policies and initiatives at the national level. The article then examines green growth ambitions at the provincial level in East Kalimantan province. Our findings suggest that existing plans to further expand oil palm plantations are at odds with provincial efforts to reduce emissions. This highlights a key paradox we identify at the heart of the green economy concept as it is developing in Indonesia: between a development trajectory based on resource extraction and agro-industrial development, and ‘green’ aspirations linked to environmental protection and greenhouse gas emissions reductions. We conclude that the main challenges to address these contradictions are related to the lack of coordination between different governance scales and a political economy that is not conducive to reforms in the land-based sector. There is a need to align investment, planning, and green growth policies, based on a strong political commitment and an awareness of social and environmental trade-offs. On a more general level the article shows that the green economy concept refers to a form of environmental governance in which authorities and interests may overlap and come into conflict at different scales. Hence, differing priorities may lead the material expression of the green economy to diverge significantly from policy as it is initially laid out.     

Perceptions and responses to climate policy risks among California farmers

This paper considers how farmers perceive and respond to climate change policy risks, and suggests that understanding these risk responses is as important as understanding responses to biophysical climate change impacts. Based on a survey of 162 farmers in California, we test three hypotheses regarding climate policy risk: (1) that perceived climate change risks will have a direct impact on farmer's responses to climate policy risks, (2) that previous climate change experiences will influence farmer's climate change perceptions and climate policy risk responses, and (3) that past experiences with environmental policies will more strongly affect a farmer's climate change beliefs, risks, and climate policy risk responses. Using a structural equation model we find support for all three hypotheses and furthermore show that farmers’ negative past policy experiences do not make them less likely to respond to climate policy risks through participation in a government incentive program. We discuss how future research and climate policies can be structured to garner greater agricultural participation. This work highlights that understanding climate policy risk responses and other social, economic and policy perspectives is a vital component of understanding climate change beliefs, risks and behaviors and should be more thoroughly considered in future work.     

Diffusion of global climate policy: National depoliticization,local repoliticization in Turkey

Although climate policy diffusion is widely studied, we know comparatively little about how these global policies and the norms that surround them are used by various political actors seeking to advance their own agendas. In this article, we focus on how global climate norms are diffused differently at national and local scales and used to repoliticize or depoliticize climate change. We focus on the case of Turkey, which carries the stark contrast of showing willingness to achieve global climate goals in the international arena but less so in domestic politics and actions. The article employs a novel methodological approach, using topic modeling and network analyses on a range of climate change–related policy documents, and interviews with high-level officers, conducted at the three jurisdictional levels in Turkey. The findings reveal that although global climate policy is diffused to both national and local governments, it is used in different ways at these levels. The national government uses climate policy diffusion to depoliticize climate change by creating ad hoc climate coalitions and limiting local climate actions to seeking external climate-related funds. Meanwhile, the metropolitan municipalities replicate nationally adopted climate goals, whereas the district municipalities domesticate ambitious climate norms and repoliticize climate change via local climate entrepreneurs and civic action. The paper contributes to understanding how climate policy diffusion and norm domestication can have different political outcomes in achieving global climate goals and argues for increased policy attention to the strategic use of climate policy diffusion for the depoliticization of climate change.     

Divide and conquer—Discursive agency in the politics of illegal logging in the United States

In 2008 the US amended the century-old US Lacey Act to prohibit the import of illegally harvested or traded timber. Together with similar policies in the EU and Australia, this initialized a paradigm shift in global forest governance towards a legality (verification) regime that could substantially contribute to environmental and social stewardship in the forest sector. The analysis of the formation and implementation of these new policies in the US, Europe and Australia is, however, only just beginning.Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, 19 informal conversations, more than 100 documents, and participant observation data, we analyze the policy making and implementation of the 2008 US Lacey Act amendment. Our results suggest two essential drivers for this policy change: (1) the deployment of discursive divide-and-conquer strategies and (2) a shift away from sustainability to legality, on both the international level and in the US. Based on the Discursive Agency Approach, we illustrate how carefully deployed discursive and governance strategies were crucial for building a coalition between environmentalists and parts of the wood (products) industry. This coalition was able to create a powerful storyline that muted the opposition and presented a politically attractive amendment proposal. We further show how these strategies have significant effects on the perception of the amended Lacey Act and its implementation. During implementation, coalitions as well as discursive and governance strategies shifted substantially but were still determined by the pre-amendment policy discourse. We conclude by exploring the importance of our findings for what we might expect from the concept of legality in global forest and environmental governance.     

Social impacts of climate change mitigation policies and their implications for inequality

The Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set ambitious targets for environmental, economic and social progress. Climate change mitigation policies play a central role in this process. To maximize the benefits and minimize the negative effects of climate change mitigation policies, policymakers need to be aware of the indirect and often complex social and inequality impacts that these policies may have and the pathways through which these impacts emerge. Better understanding of the distributional and inequality impacts is important to avoid negative social and distributional outcomes as countries ratchet up their climate policy ambition in the post-Paris context. This paper synthesizes evidence from the existing literature on social co-impacts of climate change mitigation policy and their implications for inequality. The analysis shows that most policies are linked to both co-benefits and adverse side-effects, and can compound or lessen inequalities depending on contextual factors, policy design and policy implementation. The risk of negative outcomes is greater in contexts characterized by high levels of poverty, corruption and economic and social inequalities, and where limited action is taken to identify and mitigate potentially adverse side-effects.

Key policy insights

• The risk of adverse social outcomes associated with climate change mitigation policies, including worsening inequality, increases as countries ratchet up their ambition to meet the Paris Agreement targets. Many policies that have so far only been piloted will need to be up-scaled.

• Negative inequality impacts of climate policies can be mitigated (and possibly even prevented), but this requires conscious effort, careful planning and multi-stakeholder engagement. Best results can be achieved when potential inequality impacts are taken into consideration in all stages of policy making, including policy planning, development and implementation.

• Climate change mitigation policies should take a pro-poor approach that, in best case scenarios, can also lead to a reduction of existing inequalities.

     

Closing the governance gaps in the water-energy-food nexus: Insights from integrative governance

The water-energy-food nexus has become a popular concept in environmental change research and policy debates. Proponents suggest that a nexus approach promotes policy coherence through identifying optimal policy mixes and governance arrangements across the water, energy and food sectors. Although the nexus literature identifies some barriers to achieving coherence it does not clearly explain why the barriers are present, what influences them, and how they can be acted upon. These gaps disconnect the nexus literature from the governance processes it ultimately seeks to influence. This paper examines how the integrative environmental governance literature can help to close these gaps. It extracts insights from seven streams of research literature and discusses their relevance for the nexus literature. We argue that connecting the nexus to decision-making processes requires: i) rethinking the boundaries of nexus analysis vis-à-vis other sectors and levels; ii) elaboration of shared principles that can guide decision-making towards policy coherence − or an appropriate form of fragmentation − in different contexts; iii) viewing policy coherence as a continuous process of changing values and perception rather than as an outcome.