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It is instructive to juxtapose two contrasting models of risk communication. The first views risk communication as a product that is packaged and transmitted, unmodified and intact, to a passive public. The second, a relational approach, views it as a process in which experts, the public, and agencies engage in open communication, regarding the public as an equal partner in risk communication. The second model has the benefit of taking advantage of the public’s local knowledge and ability to engage in risk communication themselves. Risk communication should be understood as more of a dynamic process, and less of a packaged object. An example of the relational model is found in Bangladesh’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme, which has incorporated the relational model in its disaster risk reduction training for community volunteers. Nevertheless, the two contrasting models, in practice, are never mutually exclusive, and both are needed for effective disaster risk prevention.

A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collective action. Part of this impasse stems from a gap between the multidimensional nature of contemporary global crises and unidimensional modes of understanding and managing them. In this article, we describe an integrative approach rooted in the paradigm of social ecology that might enable us to tackle these challenges more comprehensively. We discuss, for example, how a social ecological perspective focuses attention not only on the carbon footprint of society but also on the social footprint of carbon. We review the tenets of social ecology and reflect on its promise for spurring new modes of collaborative research and collective action, including more effective strategies for planetary governance.

Previous work has focused on the role of social capital on resilience. However, this research tends to search for civic and other organizations, often formal institutionalized groups which, when they are not found, leads to questions about how social networks are possibly governed. Without formal organizational structures to govern these networks, how is pro-environmental/pro-social behavior sustained. In this article, we focus on a diffused mechanism for collective action, which is referred to as relationality. Relationality is a theory that underscores how social connectedness, through mechanisms of empathy, foster collective action in noncentralized modes of network governance. The concept of relationality addresses important issues not considered by the literature on social capital --so being, we will refer to relational elements as relational capital. Relational capital constitutes a type of asset that communities can activate vis-a-vis environmental and other perturbation. As we describe, the evidence for relationality as an important mechanism for sustainability and resilience is accumulating. © 2023 by the authors.

Purpose: The intent of the work is to go beyond the conventional model of disaster risk prevention, where community residents are objects of risk communication initiatives, and develop and implement a relational model of risk communication wherein they are active agents of knowledge transfer. Design/methodology/approach: The relational model of risk communication translates risk knowledge into narrative forms that community members can share. The article discusses the conceptual basis of the model and, then, describes how it has been pilot tested and implemented in the field. Evaluation of the pilot tests consist of pre- and post-surveys comparing control and test groups. Findings: Encouraging results have been seen among vulnerable communities, such as residents in a refugee camp and schoolchildren in a storm surge vulnerable town. These outcomes support the idea that the relational approach can empower residents to be active agents of risk communication. Originality/value: The relational model taps into the knowledge and agency of community. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This Element argues that relational policy analysis can provide deeper insights into the career of any policy and the dynamics of any policy situation. This task is all the more difficult as the relational often operates unseen in the backstages of a policy arena. Another issue is the potentially unbounded scope of a relational analysis. But these challenges should not dissuade policy scholars from beginning to address the theme of relationality in public policy. This Element sketches a conceptual framework for the study of relationality and illustrates some of the promise of relational analysis using an extended case study. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This perspectives piece examines efforts to enact a new approach to risk communication (referred to as the relational model of risk communication) in the field. The model involves empowering community residents to translate and spread knowledge concerning risks from extreme weather events. The process of implementing and evaluating the model by the Cyclone Preparedness Programme of Bangladesh is described. Of particular interest is the task of analyzing the program's effects in practice, which involved an ad hoc exercise in data collection and analysis. The study found that the enhanced mode of risk communication was indeed practiced in the field. Secondly, there was a marked improvement in evacuation behavior, which may partly be due to the risk communication program. The inquiry underscores both the potential and challenges of conducting field evaluation (whether after or during an event). The capacities for evaluation of field agents need to be fostered, as well as the construction of systematic data collection instruments for use in real-time. © 2022 The Author(s)

The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released. In it, several sections address climate change, mitigation, and adaptation in cities, with discussions of the crucial role of planning and governance in the same. This article offers a reflection on the urban elements of AR6, pointing to the prevalence of ideological elements in it, typologizing form over critical assessments of real conditions in developing cities. As much as AR6 emphasizes the carbon footprint of society, it ignores the social footprint of carbon and the potentially massive adjustments mitigation and adaptation will require of developing nations and their urban populations. © The Author(s) 2022.

Coastal communities in Bangladesh and around the world are at increasing risk of climate-induced disaster-shocks. In recent years, Bangladesh has been able to reduce the risk of disasters through a robust institutional intervention. It is assumed that learning from past experience has played a significant role in such risk reduction and resilience-building processes. However, how learning at multiple societal levels shapes community resilience to disaster-shocks is poorly understood. In light of this gap, the present research empirically investigates social learning at community and multiple institutional levels, and transformative learning at the individual level, from cyclonic shocks in selected coastal communities in Bangladesh. This thesis departs from the normative framing and thoughts on the relationships among learning, resilience, and DRR; it adopts a critical approach to investigate the role of learning at different levels that shapes community resilience. I followed a qualitative research approach that was supplemented by a household survey (n=240). The results revealed that the coastal communities in Bangladesh have a rich stock of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) that helps them to generate early warnings and reduce their risk from cyclones and associated storm surges. Translation of such ILK into action often depends on the state of social memory. Formal institutional interventions often contribute to the development of negative social memory. Moreover, formal institutional interventions (e.g., NGO-led) often deny ILK a meaningful role in social learning processes. Concerning transformative learning, I further found that the relationship between transformative learning and resilience building is complex, involving multiple social-cultural-structural factors (e.g., beliefs, values, power structures), practical considerations (e.g., impact on livelihood, evacuation and relocation logistics), and cognitive factors. Regarding the multi-loop learning at

Policy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working and reworking of relationships among policy actors. We define relationality and develop its use in policy research. While the relational can be depicted as an alternative model for policy (e.g., Confucian versus Weberian), it is more accurate to understand it as a system that complements conventional policy regimes. To illustrate the concept, we examine examples from policymaking in China. We end with a discussion of how relationality should be a general condition that should be applicable to many, if not all, policy situations. © 2020 The Author(s).

Despite decades of progress in disaster risk reduction, efforts to enhance risk awareness and influence behavioral change still seem to be falling short. When we reflect on our collective experience and envision the future of disaster risk reduction programs, we find promise in approaches that implicitly treat knowledge as not just something transmitted but as a relationship fostered with multiple publics. In this mode, the public is not simply a passive recipient of expert knowledge but a co-producer of risk knowledge. We argue that disaster risk reduction requires a reorientation based on a foundation built on three areas of research: (1) Indigenous and local knowledge, (2) social learning, and (3) narrative ways of knowing. We employ key ideas from these promising areas of research to formulate an integrative framework for the co-production of risk knowledge. Such an integrative framework can provide a powerful and useful vehicle for generating new practices around disaster risk reduction. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

In this article, we take up the overlapping nature of crises, and reflect on the knowledge we have gained vis-a-vis learning in a time of pandemic. COVID-19 and climate change have both, in overlapping ways, changed our understanding of what constitutes just and empowering approaches to crisis risk communication. In both areas of concern, the public has had to appropriate and interpret technical knowledge, and apply the same to risk situations. At times, whether it concerns the efficacy of masks for preventing COVID-19, or evacuating ahead of an impending tropical cyclone, the public has had to become their own local experts. Our work is guided by the ethic of relationality, which eschews objectification of the public, instead aiming for their full inclusion as partners in risk reduction. The challenge is to re-orient the role of the public from a passive recipient of expert knowledge to an active agent capable of acquiring, translating, and acting upon risk information. One interesting strategy has been to craft empowerment workshops where community members gain competencies in acquiring risk knowledge and translating the same into narrative forms that they can, in turn, share with others. This was translated into a lesson plan for elementary students in Tacloban, Philippines, on the risks of storm surge. We also describe how the same lesson was repurposed for COVID-19 risk communication. The case studies speak to an emerging form of environmental education that is relevant to crises of the Anthropocene. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

As extreme weather events seemingly increase in frequency and magnitude, we are accumulating evidence about how the intersection of circumstances creates vulnerability. The specter of elderly residents in Brooklyn, New York, trapped in their apartments for days due to flooding from the storm surge brought by Hurricane Sandy, provides us a troubling lesson. As vulnerability emerges from the confluence of multiple factors, changing social, natural, and other factors combine to create unimagined problems. Hong Kong is a case in point. The city has seen much of its new development occurring on reclaimed coastal land. At the same time, there has been a significant demographic shift as the city’s elderly population has been its fastest growing demographic. The social transition also means more elderly persons living alone. All of these produce conditions that render the population increasingly vulnerable to coastal flooding. Yet, there is not enough systematic effort, in major cities, at identifying these vulnerabilities. Hong Kong is emblematic of coastal cities the world over, in that it has yet to come to a full realization of such emerging risks. Future research must be able to analyze intersectionalities. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

In privileging expert risk assessments, we may be failing to recognize the authenticity of a community’s actual experience of risk. We should remind ourselves that expert measures are always only partial, often surrogate, estimates of such experience and, at times, may fail to capture the actual nature of risk. There is a need for modes of analysis that allow better description of risk as experienced by community. We develop and test the methods for exploring hitherto delegitimized modes of knowing risk. In this exploratory research, narrative-linguistic analysis and cognitive mapping were used to evaluate the experience of residents near a large, municipal landfill. Text was analyzed, in part using speech-act theory. These methods aspire to thick description, as opposed experts' thin description of risk, and add to the analytical tools at our disposal. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

All too often, warnings and evacuation advisories during extreme weather events go unheeded. Of the many issues facing risk communication, three stand out, in particular. The first concerns the problem that risk messages often do not seem self-relevant to the public. The second, related, issue is that the language is often seen as merely technical and perfunctory. The third is that, especially among marginalized population groups, too many are not reached by risk communication. The paper takes up a relational model of risk communication that seeks to frame messages as narratives each member can transmit. This model, where residents act as local expert risk communicators, has been translated into lessons for primary curricula. The idea is that students themselves can bring knowledge into homes and neighborhoods, reaching even the most excluded. The model involves democratizing risk communication, where students become teachers, and they help others become teachers as well (“teaching to the nth”). We implement the model in a primary school in Leyte province, Philippines. Initial results are encouraging, and the paper concludes with further discussion of the broader applications of the relational model for disaster risk reduction. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Each year, lives are needlessly lost to floods due to residents failing to heed evacuation advisories. Risk communication research suggests that flood warnings need to be more vivid, contextualized, and visualizable, in order to engage the message recipient. This paper makes the case for the development of a low-cost augmented reality tool that enables individuals to visualize, at close range and in three-dimension, their homes, schools, and places of work and worship subjected to flooding (modeled upon a series of federally expected flood hazard levels). This paper also introduces initial tool development in this area and the related data input stream. © 2020 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. All rights reserved.

So long as transaction costs are low, the creation of a tradeable permit to emit carbon should allow bargaining for emission rights among buyers and sellers, resulting in an efficient allocation of carbon emission rights. However, the trading of carbon credits may have socially unjust consequences. In this article, we explore some hitherto unrecognized disequities. One of these may be the creation of toxic hotspots as the trade of carbon may bring with it a transfer of air toxics, as well. We illustrate the argument by examining emissions from refineries participating in California’s cap-and-trade program. These considerations are a concern for the larger question of carbon mitigation as the global community strives to identify feasible, yet just, approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Contrary to the idea of alienable rights, the transfer of carbon affects people and place in ways not internalized by these market instruments. © Copyright © 2020 Lejano, Kan and Chau.

Narrative is the stuff of community. The Power of Narrative embarks on a quest to understand how narrative works in taking an inchoate group of individuals and turning it into a powerful social movement. To understand the force of narrative, the authors examine the particular phenomenon of climate skepticism. Somehow, the narrative of climate skepticism has been able to forge a movement and stake a challenge to the hegemony of the larger community of scientists on what is ostensibly a matter of science. The book asks: How is this achieved? What is the narrative of climate skepticism, and how has it evolved over time and diffused from place to place? Is it possible that this narrative shares with other issue narratives an underlying genetic code of sorts, a story that is more fundamental than all of these? How has the climate skeptical narrative contended with its other, which is the narrative-network of climate change science, and forged its own social movement? The outcome of this struggle between climate science and its denial has implications for society that go far beyond climatology. Using narrative and discourse analysis, the authors demonstrate how the narrative lens allows us unique insights into these questions. The book takes the reader on a journey, across times and places and social realms; throughout, we see the power of narrative at work, making believers, or skeptics, of us all. © Oxford University Press 2020.

There are many reasons that people, when warned of an impending extreme event, do not take proactive, self-defensive action. We focus on one possible reason, which is that, sometimes, people lack a sense of agency or even experience disempowerment, which can lead to passivity. This article takes up one situation where the possibility of disempowerment is salient, that of Rohingya refugees who were evicted from their homes in Myanmar and forced to cross the border into neighboring Bangladesh. In their plight, we see the twin elements of marginalization and displacement acting jointly to produce heightened vulnerability to the risks from extreme weather. Building on a relational model of risk communication, a consortium of researchers and practitioners designed a risk communication training workshop that featured elements of empowerment-based practice. The program was implemented in two refugee camps. Evaluation suggests that the workshop may have had an appreciable effect in increasing participants' sense of agency and hope, while decreasing their level of fatalism. The outcomes were considerably more positive for female than male participants, which has important implications. This work underscores the potential for participatory modes of risk communication to empower the more marginalized, and thus more vulnerable, members of society. © 2020 Society for Risk Analysis

While the goals of sustainability and resilience look to the health and function of the system, a new criterion, relationality, focuses relationship and the degree of connectedness, social and otherwise, among persons (and even nonhuman others). It is founded upon an ethic of care that posits that no one is left alone, and that society must place a primary focus on the most vulnerable. This is particularly relevant when considering how cities are beginning to deal with increasingly frequent and severe weather events due to climate change. The idea of relationality is contrasted with the social and political isolation that exacerbates the effects of extreme events on the most vulnerable. The article ends with a discussion around how we might envision and craft the relational city and how this ideal responds to the challenge of climate change and extreme weather. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

In this article we present a ‘narrative network' approach, which by virtue of its engagement with the non-human and with collaborative decision-making, is especially well suited to support social scientists in better comprehending the diverse possibilities for environmental governance in the Anthropocene. The most highly salient Anthropocene narrative is focused on physical phenomena, and neglects the importance and dynamism of the social landscape. Despite the dire warnings conveyed by this narrative dominated by the physical sciences, the solutions it recommends rely on status quo institutional arrangements. In this article, we explain and illustrate how the narrative-network analysis can identify and describe successful political action by largely informal networks that bridge geographic, economic, cultural, and political differences and embrace participatory environmental governance. We illustrate the power of narrative-network analysis to reveal an environmental network in the case of the Sonora Desert at the US–Mexican border. Such networks can be the vanguard of discourse and policy change, raising neglected issues and undertaking collaborative action that foreshadows later formalization, and enlist the participation of actors ordinarily far outside the policy-making process. We add to our previous work on narratives by explaining how the narrative-network analysis can be useful to discursive scholarship in environmental planning and policy. We harness analytical methods associated with narratology and social psychology to tap into the communicative dimension of the discourse dynamics. © 2015, © 2015 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Sustainability and resilience are most often thought of as systems concepts that evaluate the state and function of objects of interest as well as the system as a whole. In this article, we shift the focus toward the "space in between"-i.e., the relationships among objects in the system. The article develops the concept of relationality, which provides a new lens to understanding what social and material processes drive or impede the functioning and sustainability of a social-ecological system (SES). Relationality seeks to understand a system not so much as a set of interacting objects but a web of relationships. By foregrounding relationships, we are better able to understand the rich ground of practice that guides a system in ways that the formal rational designs do not explain. Several examples are drawn from the literature that suggests how a relational analysis might proceed and what social-ecological phenomena we can better explain by this means. The article ends with a note on how the promise of relational analyses also bears in it its challenges. © 2019 by the authors.

The theory of cooperative n-person games offers a rigorous approach for analysing multilateral real-world agreements, but its practical application is hindered by the exacting data requirements demanded by the fully specified theoretical models. In this article, we demonstrate how the formal analytic can be made more amenable to application. We utilize our approach to model international climate negotiations as an n-person cooperative game, the solution of which allocates carbon reductions across the grand coalition of nations. Using a simplified game to represent the carbon reduction allocation problem, we obtain theoretical solutions using a game-theoretic concept known as the proportional nucleolus. The solution to the game allows us to ideally determine countries’ relative percentage carbon reductions. These theoretical results are compared against actual commitments established in the Paris Agreement of 2015. The paper discusses the implications of the game-theoretic results, including the significant under-commitment of nations such as the United States. More generally, the approach developed herein provides an illustration of how rigorous game-theoretic methods can be adapted to the practical considerations of policy analysis. © 2018 Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy Ltd.

It is reasonable to assume that more effective communication of climate science might be the remedy for widespread climate skepticism. However, narrative analysis of climate-skeptical discourse suggests it can be otherwise. Taking the United States as a case in point, we argue how at least some forms of climate skepticism are founded upon an ideological narrative that (for its adherents) is prior to, or more fundamental than, the issue of climate. In other words, skepticism may not always (or even usually) be fundamentally about climate to begin with. This more basic, universal, ideological construct at the root of climate skepticism encompasses social status, race and ethnicity, class, culture, and other social conditions. If climate-skeptical discourse in the United States is commonly built upon a genetic metanarrative that is really about social fracture, it may be resilient to scientific argument. It is quite possible that responding to climate skepticism will require addressing the more basic ideological divide and challenging the underlying genetic narrative. In the rest of the essay, we sketch out possible avenues for positive steps forward.

Sustainability entails considering multiple values in decision-making. However, evaluation most often devolves into thin, unidimensional interpretations of value (e.g., as market price). This article develops an alternative (narrative) mode of assessment that involves “thick” description that preserves the distinctiveness of different types of values, such as the cultural and ecological. The narrative approach combines otherwise incommensurable qualities into a coherent description of the situation, achieving integration not through commensuration but emplotment. The narrative analytic framework is described and then applied to a case study involving development around ecological habitat in Hong Kong. The article ends with a note on the applicability of narrative analytics for capturing sustainability. © 2019

To a degree insufficiently captured by the term governance, the present age is one of institutional complexity. China is a case in point. An amalgam of socialist, capitalist, corporatist, and pluralist characteristics, China's systems of governance defy classification using extant categories in the institutionalist literature. What, after all, is a socialist market system? A Phenomenology of Institutions begins with the problem of describing emergent institutional phenomena using conventional typologies. Constructing a new descriptive framework for rendering new, hybrid, and flexible institutional designs, Raul Lejano, Jia Guo, Hongping Lian, and Bo Yin propose new descriptors, involving concepts of autopoeisis, textuality, and relationality, that might better describe new and emergent models of governance. The authors illustrate the utility of this framework with a number of case studies, each dealing with a different aspect of Chinese legal and civic institutions and comparing these with 'Western' models. This book will be a valuable resource for institutional scholars in the fields of public policy, political science, organization studies, public administration, and international development, studying new and emergent forms of governance. © 2019 Taylor & Francis.

There is growing evidence that the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events may be increasing in conjunction with climate change. This means that many communities will encounter phenomena, such as extreme storm surge events, never before experienced by local residents. The tragic effects of Typhoon Haiyan on the city of Tacloban, Philippines, in November 2013 were attributed, in part, to the inability of routine technical bulletins to communicate the unprecedented nature of the predicted storm surge. In re-sponse, the authors construct a relational model of risk communication that suggests that narrative messages that simulate direct face-to-face communication may be more effective in spurring action. Conducting a postevent target audience study in the city of Tacloban, the authors tested the relative effectiveness of narrative-based versus technical message designs on residents who chose not to evacuate during the typhoon. Results show increased effectiveness of the narrative design vis-à-vis intent to evacuate, self-relevance and vividness of the message, and perceived authority of the message source. The study also explored factors behind noncompliance with evacuation advisories. The research supports the relational model, which cap-tures insights from recent research on evacuation and emergency preparedness for extreme hazard events. It supports a broader effort to democratize risk communication and, in so doing, increase people’s sense of agency in preparing for these events. © 2018 American Meteorological Society.

Spatial injustices, especially the disproportionate exposure of disadvantaged communities to environmental risks, stem from an inability to appreciate the lived experience of risk and, instead, a reliance on technical frameworks for regulating it. We review Noddings’ ideas about the caring attitude, in particular, that of caring for and, to some degree, caring about, and apply this to the issue of knowing about the experience of vulnerability and crafting effective and affective responses to it. We apply this lens to the case study of Southeast Los Angeles, where a profusion of small sources of air toxics creates zones of inordinate risk, and ask: How should the state and community have responded in a more caring way? How could the teachers and schoolchildren, themselves, have been empowered to speak for themselves? We draw lessons from it that speak to how we can begin reforming the regulatory state. ©, Copyright © The College of Education and Human Ecology, The Ohio State University.

Informality is thought of as a spontaneous, uncontrolled response to the mass urbanization rapidly sweeping the globe. Much of the new housing stock in the developing world is being provided for by the informal sector. Rather than treat this as an unplanned, liminal spatial practice, we should instead seek to better theorize and describe its socio-spatial logic. We propose that informal settlements do exhibit a complex logic that is grounded in practice, which we refer to as a logic of enactment. We develop a set of propositions for characterizing these logics, building on a Bourdieusian framework, and test these in Guapira II, a favela in São Paulo. Informal logic, as manifested in informal settlements, is seen to exhibit the characteristics of sociopoiesis and contextuality, constituting a complex rationality. The nature of design in the informal is a relational one. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Policy scholars need to better describe the diversity of actors and interests that forge collective political action through nonformal social networks. The authors find extant theories of collective action to only partially explain such heterogeneity, which is exemplified by the urban protest movements in Hong Kong. A new concept, that of the narrative-network, appears better able to describe movements chiefly characterized by heterogeneity. Instead of simple commonalities among members, a relevant property is the plurivocity of narratives told by members of the coalition. Analyzing ethnographic interviews of members of the movement, the authors illustrate the utility of narrative-network analysis in explaining the complex and multiple motivations behind participation. Narrativity and the shared act of narration, within an inclusive and democratic community, are part of what sustains the movement. The research further develops the theory of the narrative-network, which helps explain the rise of street protest in Hong Kong as an emergent, alternative form of civic engagement. © 2017, The Author(s).

Marine spatial allocation has become, in recent decades, a political flashpoint, fuelled by political power struggles, as well as the continuously increasing demand for marine space by both traditional and emerging marine uses. To effectively address this issue, we develop a decision-making procedure, that facilitates the distribution of disputed areas of specific size among heterogeneous players in a transparent and ethical way, while considering coalitional formations through coexistence. To do this, we model players' alternative strategies and payoffs within a cooperative game-theoretic framework. Depending on whether transferable utility (TU) or non-transferable utility (NTU) is the more appropriate assumption, we illustrate the use of the TU Shapley value and the Lejano's fixed point NTU Shapley value to solve for the ideal allocations. The applicability and effectiveness of the process has been tested in a case study area, the Dogger Bank Special Area of Conservation in the North Sea, which involves three totally or partially conflicting activities, i.e. fishing, nature conservation and wind farm development. The findings demonstrate that the process is capable of providing a unique, fair and equitable division of space Finally, among the two solution concepts proposed the fixed point NTU Shapley value manages to better address the heterogeneity of the players and thus to provide a more socially acceptable allocation that favours the weaker player, while demonstrating the importance of the monetary valuation attributed by each use to the area.

A central concern in policy studies is understanding how multiple, contending groups in society interact, deliberate, and forge agreements over policy issues. Often, public discourse turns from engagement into impasse, as in the fractured politics of climate policy in the USA. Existing theories are unclear about how such an “adversarial turn” develops. We theorize that an important aspect of the adversarial turn is the evolution of a group’s narrative into what can be understood as an ideology, the formation of which is observable through certain textual-linguistic properties. Analysis “of” these narrative properties elucidates the role of narrative in fostering (1) coalescence around a group ideology, and (2) group isolation and isolation of ideological coalitions from others’ influence. By examining a climate skeptical narrative, we demonstrate how to analyze ideological properties of narrative, and illustrate the role of ideological narratives in galvanizing and, subsequently, isolating groups in society. We end the piece with a reflection on further issues suggested by the narrative analysis, such as the possibility that climate skepticism is founded upon a more “genetic” meta-narrative that has roots in social issues far removed from climate, which means efforts at better communicating climate change science may not suffice to support action on climate change. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

Communities are sorted through differencing, the social construction of distinction. This, in turn, enables what we term social rendering: erasure of existing community and reimagination of an alternative one. This practice is founded upon an evolutionary notion of development as ecological succession, involving the intersectionality of race, class, and other markers. Such social genotyping leads to a genitocracy built around systems of differences. We examine the effect of present-day redevelopment practice on the Southern California community of Santa Ana. We illustrate how the processes of differencing and rendering undermine the sociocultural fabric of authentic community life. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.

How does one begin to construct lasting solutions to environmental problems, the lived experiences of which exceed and defy their framing as environmental (or even as problematic)? Situations exhibit an irreducible autonomy often not amenable to strategic intervention. An emerging concept, proposed as an analytical framework for complex systems, is that of the response assemblage, which is the phenomenal convergence of autonomous elements into provisional, revisable wholes. I argue that these proposals provide interesting possibilities for analysis which, at this point, are not yet operational. Furthermore, when these concepts begin to be translated into analysis, we should encounter a number of unavoidable conceptual issues. I describe some tentative analytical strategies that might be useful for assemblage work, such as a hermeneutic approach to describing the relational. With each provisional analytical turn, I describe how these obdurate conceptual questions re-emerge. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.

A dominant form of integrated water resources management (IWRM) assumes that existing parochial path dependencies need to be overcome to transform fragmented, contested regimes into the integrative design of IWRM. This paper is an exploratory study of stakeholder perceptions around China’s Yellow River, which has been hailed as a successful case of IWRM. We find that while water reforms have ostensibly achieved a programme that adheres to the formal discourse of IWRM, subjective perceptions of the stakeholders, as revealed by the Q methodology, still display elements of a localized, fragmented narrative, requiring constant negotiation. Primary elements of the discourse include the following positions: (1) localized, contextual approaches to governance persist; (2) market efficiency and environmental protection are seen as competing goals; and (3) technology creates new gains, but constant negotiation is needed to distribute them fairly. These narratives show that rather than “overturning” old paths, the water reforms created a deliberatory arena in which old and new ideas meld into what we refer to as a “thick” institutional narrative. Our work provides a new perspective on policy change, as well as the persistence of institutional life. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.

We examine the role of the regulatory state in the inequitable distribution of social advantages and disadvantages. To illustrate this, we examine the spatial distribution of exposures to air toxics from noxious land uses (commonly referred to as the environmental justice problem) and inquire into the nature of state action that would allow such inequity. Findings from our inquiry lead us to focus more closely on the administrative functions of the state, especially its role as a regulatory body. A case study focusing on health risks from incompatible land uses illustrates how spatial inequities result from the formally neutral rule-making actions of regulatory agencies and their particular organizational cultures. We describe the ethical basis of the regulatory state in terms of its formal, juridical, deontological underpinnings. In contrast to this stands the alternative ethical concept of care, which is inherently relational, contextual, and preferentially attentive to the needs of the vulnerable. We argue that the regulatory state can be reformed, building structures of care to better address issues of spatial inequity. We end with a discussion of how the institutional model of the caring state might be achieved in practice. © 2016 by American Association of Geographers.

As the world's urban poor increase in numbers, they become acutely vulnerable to hazards from extreme weather events. On 8 November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan struck the province of Leyte, Philippines, with casualties numbering in the thousands, largely because of the ensuing storm surge that swept the coastal communities. This study investigates the role and dynamics of risk communication in these events, specifically examining the organizational processing of text within a complex institutional milieu. The authors show how the risk communication process failed to convey meaningful information about the predicted storm surge, transmitting and retransmitting the same routine text instead of communicating authentic messages in earnest. The key insight is that, rather than focus solely on the verbatim transmission of a scripted text, risk communication needs to employ various modes of translation and feedback signals across organizational and institutional boundaries. Adaptation will require overcoming organizational rigidities in order to craft proportionate responses to extreme weather events that may lie outside personal and institutional memory. Future work should build upon the textual processing approach to risk communication, expanding it into a comprehensive relational model of environmental cognition. © 2016 American Meteorological Society.

One of the ‘tools’ of urban regeneration is discourse – that is, the social construction of new strategies for uplifting parts of the city. In this article, we take an institutionalist approach and contrast textualist urban development regimes from contextualist ones, building on recent theoretical advances in institutional contextualism. A review of the institutional literature underscores the utility of this lens in analysing the discourse and practice of urban regeneration. We demonstrate the contrast between text and context in practice and point to a new contextualism in urban planning and design. Drawing upon examples from Hong Kong, we discuss particular challenges, such as textual autopoiesis, for regenerative urban design. © 2015 The Institute of Urban Sciences.

When the development of marine renewable energy (MRE) is only possible inside already established marine protected areas (MPAs), and there is a risk of ecosystem loss, environmental or monetary compensation -being the last step in a hierarchy of mitigation measures- might be an option for working out a trade-off between energy production and nature protection. In this article, it is argued that for this type of siting situation, instead of the well-established strategy of no net loss, a net gain should be provided from the MRE developer to the MPA manager, which acts as an incentive for the manager to cooperate and covers future potentially lost conservation benefits due to MRE potential damages. Based on this argument, a hypothetical example is used to demonstrate that a net gain is ensured only when there is a societal surplus from a combined MRE-MPA arrangement that can be divided between the players through bargaining. However, when asymmetric information is involved, it is shown that cooperative solution concepts are more sufficient for leaving both players better off after coexistence than before.

How can communities enhance social-ecological resilience within complex urban systems? Drawing on a new urbanist proposal in Orange County, California, it is suggested that planning that ignores diverse ways of knowing undermines the experience and shared meaning of those living in a city. The paper then describes how narratives lay at the core of efforts to reintegrate the Los Angeles River into the life of the city and the US Fire Learning Network’s efforts to address the nation’s wildfire crisis. In both cases, participants develop partially shared stories about alternative futures that foster critical learning and facilitate co-ordination without imposing one set of interests on everyone. It is suggested that narratives are a way to express the subjective and symbolic meaning of resilience, enhancing our ability to engage multiple voices and enable self-organising processes to decide what should be made resilient and for whose benefit. © 2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited.

Regulatory agencies often face a dilemma when regulating chemicals in consumer products-namely, that of making decisions in the face of multiple, and sometimes conflicting, lines of evidence. We present an integrative approach for dealing with uncertainty and multiple pieces of evidence in toxics regulation. The integrative risk analytic framework is grounded in the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory that allows the analyst to combine multiple pieces of evidence and judgments from independent sources of information. We apply the integrative approach to the comparative risk assessment of bisphenol-A (BPA)-based polycarbonate and the functionally equivalent alternative, Eastman Tritan copolyester (ETC). Our results show that according to cumulative empirical evidence, the estimated probability of toxicity of BPA is 0.034, whereas the toxicity probability for ETC is 0.097. However, when we combine extant evidence with strength of confidence in the source (or expert judgment), we are guided by a richer interval measure, (Bel(t), Pl(t)). With the D-S derived measure, we arrive at various intervals for BPA, with the low-range estimate at (0.034, 0.250), and (0.097,0.688) for ETC. These new measures allow a reasonable basis for comparison and a justifiable procedure for decision making that takes advantage of multiple sources of evidence. Through the application of D-S theory to toxicity risk assessment, we show how a multiplicity of scientific evidence can be converted into a unified risk estimate, and how this information can be effectively used for comparative assessments to select potentially less toxic alternative chemicals.

Networks have been embraced as appropriate means for environmental governance because of their potential inclusivity, flexibility, resilience, and ability to comprehend multiple values and ways of knowing. Analysis of networks, however, falls short of accounting for the emergence and persistence of these innovative and complex modes of governance, as well as their failures. We offer a framework for using narrative to understand and evaluate networks. We understand networks to be sets of relationships, between humans and also between humans and their environment, that define and guide behaviour. Narrative is a constitutive element of these networks; narrative and network are co-produced. Narrative analysis enables a critical investigation of environmental action and policy that at the same time captures the variety of environmental relationships and associated meanings and emotions that can inspire collaborative behaviour. Using a case study of the development of alternative agriculture in the United States, we provide a methodology for investigating ‘narrative-networks’ that affords deeper explanations of how and why emergent, often informal and unlikely, environmental networks endure over time. © 2014, © 2014 Taylor & Francis.