How institutions and beliefs affect environmental discourse: Evidence from an eight-country survey on REDD+

This paper investigates the adoption of discourses on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) across different national contexts. It draws on institutional theories to develop and test a number of hypotheses on the role of shared beliefs and politico-economic institutions in determining the discursive choices of policy actors. The results show that win–win ecological modernization discourse, embraced by powerful government agencies and international actors, dominates national REDD+ policy arenas. This discourse is challenged primarily by a minority reformist civic environmentalist discourse put forward primarily by domestic NGOs. We find evidence that countries with a less democratic political system and large-scale primary sector investments facilitate the adoption of reconciliatory ecological modernization discourse, which may not directly challenge the drivers of deforestation. Policy actors who believe in and are engaged in market-based approaches to REDD+ are much more likely to adopt ecological modernization discourses, compared to policy actors who work on community development and livelihoods issues.     

Upgrading and exploitation in the fishing industry: Contributions of value chain analysis

This article presents a framework for fisheries sector analysis based on the literatures on global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs). A value chain approach offers an alternative to focusing primarily on policy as an explanatory variable, by bringing into focus relations among buyers, sellers and other stakeholders as well as their institutional context. After outlining the utility of this approach, the article identifies three questions at the forefront of contemporary debates on the dynamics of GVCs and GPNs. Namely: (1) How institutional context affects distributional and regulatory outcomes; (2) The conditions under which particular institutions that limit or regulate market forces are either productive or perverse; and (3) Why and how particular markets are constituted in the ways that they are. The article then showcases some of the central findings from the case studies brought together in this thematic issue, demonstrating how they contribute to current analytic debates surrounding value chains and core substantive problems facing both fisheries and those engaged in the fishing industry.     

Deep Transitions: Towards a comprehensive framework for mapping major continuities and ruptures in industrial modernity

The world is confronted by a socio-ecological emergency, requiring rapid and deep decarbonization of a broad range of socio-technical systems. A recent Deep Transitions framework argues that this fundamentally unsustainable trajectory has been generated by the co-evolutionary dynamics of multiple systems during the last 250 years. Altering this direction requires transformation in industrial modernity – a set of most fundamental ideas, institutions, and practices characterizing every industrial society to date. Although the proponents of the framework suggest that this shift has been unfolding since the 1960s, no attempts have been made to operationalize the concept of industrial modernity and to assess this claim. This paper develops a comprehensive multi-dimensional and multi-domain approach for the measurement of industrial modernity. As such it seeks to provide empirical evidence of long-term continuities and emerging ruptures in the dominant ideas, institutions, and practices of industrial societies along the domains of environment and technology. Using a methodologically novel approach where the text mining of newspapers is combined with data from various databases the paper provides results from three countries – Australia, Germany, Soviet Union/Russia – between 1900 and 2020. Despite considerable country-level differences the results show shifts in public environmental discourse from the 1960s, followed by institutional changes from the 1980s but with only a modest change in practices. We also observe some change in the direction of innovative activities and their regulation coupled with a resurgent optimism in technology-environment discourse. The findings tentatively suggest that industrial modernity might be in the process of hollowing out along ideational and institutional dimensions in the environmental domain but less so in the domain of technology and innovation.     

Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: lessons from resilience thinking

Vulnerability is registered not by exposure to hazards alone; it also resides in the resilience of the system experiencing the hazard. Resilience (the capacity of a system to absorb recurrent disturbances, such as natural disasters, so as to retain essential structures, processes and feedbacks) is important for the discussion of vulnerability for three reasons: (1) it helps evaluate hazards holistically in coupled human–environment systems, (2) it puts the emphasis on the ability of a system to deal with a hazard, absorbing the disturbance or adapting to it, and (3) it is forward-looking and helps explore policy options for dealing with uncertainty and future change. Building resilience into human–environment systems is an effective way to cope with change characterized by surprises and unknowable risks. There seem to be four clusters of factors relevant to building resilience: (1) learning to live with change and uncertainty, (2) nurturing various types of ecological, social and political diversity for increasing options and reducing risks, (3) increasing the range of knowledge for learning and problem-solving, and (4) creating opportunities for␣self-organization, including strengthening of local institutions and building cross-scale linkages and problem-solving networks.     

Fishing institutions: Addressing regulative,normative and cultural-cognitive elements to enhance fisheries management

Institutional approaches in natural resource management in general and in fisheries in particular seldom address cultural aspects or social institutions like kinship. In this study, a broad institutional approach is used to investigate the institutionalization of small-scale fisheries and seaweed farming in a seagrass dominated bay in Zanzibar. Regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive institutions and their rapid/slow moving properties are analyzed. The results show that dynamics of cooperation and conflict between different institutional elements and the balance of forces among actors are crucial to understand fisheries management dynamics. Regulations are, despite their importance, insufficient to promote sound management if they are not backed up by norms and cultural-cognitive institutions. Fisheries management would benefit by broadening the institutional perspective to increase the efficiency of management and to avoid blueprint solutions. The study shows that gaining knowledge about the wide institutional setting takes time but the investment is worth it in the long run.     

Pyramids and roses: Alternative images for the governance of fisheries systems

Governors always have some image of what they are governing and why, and of what their role is. These images are often implicit. They are not reflected upon or discussed in the governance process, yet they have real consequences because they are acted upon. Interactive governance theory argues that image formation is an integral part of governance and that images are made as explicit as possible to avoid self-fulfilment. Such a process needs to be interactive and flexible to allow exploration of alternatives to existing governing images for the purpose of enhancing the governability of fisheries systems. In this paper, we contrast the classical image of the governing system (top down decision-making pyramid) and of the human-in-nature system (top down trophic pyramid) with alternative images (roses and inverted pyramid, respectively) and discuss the implication that these different images have on fisheries governance.     

关于事业单位会计制度改革的思考

随着国家财政体系改革的深入,现行的事业单位会计制度在诸多方面已经难以适应事业单位发展的需要,有些甚至在很大程度上制约了其发展,因此事业单位的会计制度面临着改革的迫切性和必要性。该文主要分析了现行事业单位会计制度存在的主要问题,并进一步提出了完善事业单位会计制度改革的建议。     

The localization of electronics manufacturing in the Greater Pearl River Delta, China: Do global implants put down local roots?

Against the background of a recent shift in growth dynamics from export-oriented activities towards the domestic market in Chinese regions, it is the aim of this paper to demonstrate how the spatial organization of the electronics industry in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta has evolved over time and to assess the impact of the institutional setting and differences between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta on localization and upgrading of the industry. The empirical findings suggest a strong trend towards the localization of business activities in China and a differentiated perspective regarding the kinds of activities that are more likely to be localized. An advanced front shop, back factory model with complementary, but intertwined assets has been identified. The institutional interpretation of spatial processes has proven its potential to further develop contextually sensitive concepts for the economic geography of China.     

Politics of scale and community-based forest management in southern Malawi

This article uses insights from theory on the social production of scale and multiple social and natural science methods to interrogate village-scale community-based forest management (CBFM) in southern Malawi, focusing on boundary demarcation, rule formulation and scaling, and dynamics of external facilitation. Examination of political agendas of those who pursued, gained from, or protested particular scalar CBFM arrangements uncovered otherwise hidden scalar politics, whose outcomes impeded more than they advanced CBFM goals. I argue that clarifying the scalar politics and configuration of forest governance arrangements can lead to a more nuanced understanding of CBFM challenges and create new opportunities for addressing them. Containerized, single-level CBFM institutions mismatched interacting social, ecological and institutional scalar configurations and relations, and confounded CBFM. Unequal international-donor/national and national/community scalar relations were as important as intra-community dynamics in explaining performance of CBFM. They constructed CBFM on a shaky foundation that put institutional and personal agendas and short-term goals over long-term socioecological sustainability. The politics of rescaling forest rules from village to (broader) Traditional Authority level alienated them from communities and undermined enforcement. Diverse motivations behind a scale-related strategy that separated usufruct from territorial rights in allocating forests mostly undermined socioecological CBFM goals. While scale is not the key or only explanation of CBFM performance, negotiated scaling offered a proactive way to anticipate scale-related conflicts in particular settings, and for communities to create institutional forms that minimize such conflicts at local or intermediate scale levels. Findings support strong, well-resourced states and caution against donor-driven quick fixes.     

Local food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges

The food sovereignty movement proposes a localist approach to meeting food security while delivering broader social, economic and environmental benefits. The movement is spawning multiple local projects of food sovereignty, whereby people are empowered to define their own culturally and environmentally appropriate food systems. As the number of enacted examples increases, the movement is also affecting change at national (and international) levels, with a number of countries creating national strategies or legislation for food sovereignty. We reflect on the challenges created by such scaling up within the existing food system. We propose a focus on issues of institutional interplay in order to identify and critique challenges. We highlight three interplay situations between multiple, diverse enactments of food sovereignty at multiple levels, and between food sovereignty and the broader institutional contexts within which they are embedded.