Search

This analysis considers the rhetoric of the Texas-based American Ethnic Coalition, and details the AEC's Attempt to achieve legal protection of English as the official language of the U.S. AEC rhetoric aligns itself with key metaphors, and uses the metaphors to exclude its opponents. Further, the AEC seeks legitimacy by posing as spokesman for the English language movement at a time when such languarge issues find currency. The constructs of freedom and unity are used to ethnocentrically justify support for Official English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public engagement is fundamental to environmental planning, yet natural resource professionals often struggle to achieve desired stakeholder participation. This policy intention–action gap often is attributed to failure to integrate people's preferences into policy recommendations. Understanding stakeholders' social control frames, or preferences regarding how society should be organized, offers one response to this challenge. Understanding how these frames (i.e., hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist) emerge may facilitate natural resource planning that appropriately addresses uncertainties implicit in managing complex human-dominated systems. We hypothesized that sociodemographic and spatial variables play an important role in an individual's social control frames related to forest conservation in Sikkim, India. Here we (1) describe administration of a questionnaire to identify social control frames, (2) report results of logistic regression examining the probability of association among key variables and social control frames, and (3) discuss conservation implications of these associations. Our results indicate that although familial generations in region was the only independent variable occurring in all four social control models, other sociodemographic variables that occurred in only one or two models also could be critically important. Similarly, altitude-related preferences may be instructive as natural resource managers assess the suitability of altitude-specific conservation. We suggest that examining how sociodemographic and spatial variables interact with social control preferences may enable resource managers to re-imagine their responsibilities in ways that are more consistent with local cultures. This can serve as a catalyst for designing and implementing policies that sustain long-term conservation goals along with broader social legitimacy and acceptance. • Targeted efforts to synchronize conservation ideals with community priorities are critical for successful conservation. • Key sociodemographic and spatial variables predicted stakeholders' social control frames or forest management preferences. • Familial generations in region was more consistently predictive of respondents' social control frames than any other variable. • Spatial variables (i.e., location-specific data) predicted preference for egalitarian approaches to forest management. • Most respondents seek opportunities to participate in collaborative forest management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to the paper "Theories about Consensus-Based Conservation," by William D. Leach in this issue which comments on the paper "Conservation and the Myth of Consensus," by M. Nils Peterson and colleagues in a 2005 issue. Clarifications are made regarding the primary issues raised by Leach who had argued that the paper by Peterson and colleagues was based on a questionable idea that consensus processes are founded on social constructionism, made the error of confusing consensus with veto power and acquiescence, and had insufficient empirical support.

Focuses on the importance of book `Legitimating the Chinese Economic Reforms: A Rhetoric of Myth and Orthodoxy,' by Alan R. Kluver on Chinese rhetoric. Management of the economic reform program of Deng Xiaoping by the Communist Party; Symbolic recreation of Mao Zedong; Justification on the move toward market socialism by mythic narratives and character.

Environmental policy makers are embracing consensus-based approaches to environmental decision making in an attempt to enhance public participation in conservation and facilitate the potentially incompatible goals of environmental protection and economic growth. Although such approaches may produce positive results in immediate spatial and temporal contexts and under some forms of governance, their overuse has potentially dangerous implications for conservation within many democratic societies. We suggest that environmental decision making rooted in consensus theory leads to the dilution of socially powerful conservation metaphors and legitimizes current power relationships rooted in unsustainable social constructions of reality. We also suggest an argumentative model of environmental decision making rooted in ecology will facilitate progressive environmental policy by placing the environmental agenda on firmer epistemological ground and legitimizing challenges to current power hegemonies that dictate unsustainable practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-policing is essential for addressing wildlife-related crime where illegal activity is extremely diffuse, and limited resources are available for monitoring and enforcement. Emerging research on self-policing suggest key drivers including economics, folk traditions, and socio-political resistance. We build on this research with a case study evaluating potential drivers of self-policing illegal wolf killing among Swedish hunting teams. Swedish hunters marginally leaned toward considering illegal hunting of wolves an expression of resistance (10.30 out of a possible 17 on a resistance scale) and strongly believed outsiders had undue influence over hunting (15.79 out of a possible 21 on an influence scale). Most (73%) Swedish hunters stated they would report illegal wolf killing to authorities, but 20% stated they would handle the infractions through internal sanctions. Viewing illegal hunting of wolves as a form of political resistance, viewing wolf management as being controlled locally, and perceived prevalence of illegal wolf killing among hunting acquaintances were positive predictors of preferring internal sanctions to address illegal wolf killing over reporting the crimes. Resistance and perceived prevalence of wolf killing also predicted preferring no action to address illegal wolf killing. These results suggest that a counterpublic of marginalized ruralism may promote forms of self-policing that rely on internal censure for illegal wolf killing rather than using formal legal channels. Similarly, folk traditions within this counterpublic (e.g., perceptions of prevalence of illegal wolf killing) shape if and how internal sanctions are advocated. Re-engaging marginalized hunting groups and emphasizing the rarity of illegal wolf killing may promote wolf conservation, both in Sweden and in other democratic regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term smart grid (SG) has been widely used in both the United States (U.S.) and Canada to represent multiple visions and configurations of electricity system change. In both countries policies, programs, and initiatives have emerged to promote technological and social changes associated with SG, and different patterns of SG implementation and governance are apparent at local, regional, and national levels. This paper reports on a comparative analysis of SG media content in nationally-circulating newspapers in the U.S. and Canada to explore patterns of SG conversations in the two countries. Media reporting about SG provides a valuable lens that reflects public discourse and also contributes to setting the public agenda by shaping public opinion and framing key issues. Despite similarities in terms of policy, program design, and SG deployment strategies, several prominent differences between the two countries emerge in public conversations. Firstly, Canadian SG newspaper content focuses more on implementation and describing people's experiences with smart meters, while the U.S. content focuses more on commercial opportunities with more reference to private sector actors and various technological components beyond smart meters. Secondly, although media coverage in both countries frequently highlights technological and economic benefits of SG, positive SG framing is more frequent in the U.S. newspapers than in the Canadian ones. Negative SG portrayals, including cultural, political and health and safety risks, are more frequently mentioned in the Canadian newspapers. These differing SG framings could be due to national level cultural differences. In the U.S, considered to be more of an individualistic society, there is more emphasis on business opportunities, being entrepreneurial, and more private sector involvement in the electricity sector. By contrast, in Canada, public authorities, more prominent in the electricity market than in the U.S., play a key role in smart grid deployment. Furthermore, in Canada, considered to have more social support structures for individuals and communities, there was more emphasis on the experiences of people. This suggests that cultural differences at the national level be a further contextual lens helpful to policy makers and technology proponents as they embark upon energy system change initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review explores the way that the illegal hunting phenomenon has been framed by research. We demarcate three main approaches that have been used to deconstruct the crime. These include ‘drivers of the deviance’, ‘profiling perpetrators’ and ‘categorizing the crime’. Disciplinary silo thinking on the part of prominent theories, an overreliance on either a micro or a macro perspective, and adherence to either an instrumental or normative perspective are identified as weaknesses in existing approaches. Based on these limitations in addressing sociopolitical dimensions of the phenomenon, we call for a more integrative understanding that moves illegal hunting from being approached as a ‘crime’ or ‘deviance’ to being seen as a political phenomenon driven by the concepts of defiance and radicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An analysis of The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The New York Times from 1998 to 2013 suggests that media coverage of smart grid issues focuses more on benefits than risks. Coverage peaked in 2009 with substantial federal-level investment in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the past decade, the United States (US) has demonstrated strong and evolving interest in the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS), an emerging set of technologies with potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. Given the many technical, economic, and environmental uncertainties about the future of CCS, the political salience of this technology is high. In the US, states make key decisions about deploying energy technology projects, but variation in state-level energy context (both technical and socio-political) is substantial. This research assesses variation in the state-level energy context for CCS development by exploring energy policy stakeholders' perceptions of CCS in four geographically and demographically diverse states. Policy stakeholders have different degrees of familiarity with CCS, and the goal of this research is to understand and compare the perceptions of CCS among stakeholders who shape state-level energy policy. Semi-structured interviews with 84 energy policy stakeholders across government, industry, academia, and non-governmental organizations active in four different states (Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana and Texas) were analyzed to compare perceptions of CCS risks and benefits. Negative associations of CCS were mentioned more frequently than positive attributes in each state, and technical, political and economic risks are more dominant than environmental or health and safety risks. Content analysis of the interviews provides insight on emerging sub-national discourse regarding CCS, on state-level variation in familiarity with CCS, and on sub-national variation in the socio-political context for energy technologies. The variation in state and stakeholder energy priorities and perceptions revealed in this study highlights challenges in the development and implementation of national-level energy policy and also specific challenges in the deployment of CCS. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and related biodiversity as ecosystem services to humanity. Despite the economic success of programs such as the Catskill/Delaware watershed management plan in the United States and the creation of global carbon exchanges, today's marketplace often fails to adequately protect biodiversity. We used a Marxist critique to explain one reason for this failure and to suggest a possible, if partial, response. Reframing ecosystem functions as economic services does not address the political problem of commodification. Just as it obscures the labor of human workers, commodification obscures the importance of the biota (ecosystem workers) and related abiotic factors that contribute to ecosystem functions. This erasure of work done by ecosystems impedes public understanding of biodiversity. Odum and Odum's radical suggestion to use the language of ecosystems (i.e., emergy or energy memory) to describe economies, rather than using the language of economics (i.e., services) to describe ecosystems, reverses this erasure of the ecosystem worker. Considering the current dominance of economic forces, however, implementing such solutions would require social changes similar in magnitude to those that occurred during the 1960s. Niklas Luhmann argues that such substantive, yet rapid, social change requires synergy among multiple societal function systems (i.e., economy, education, law, politics, religion, science), rather than reliance on a single social sphere, such as the economy. Explicitly presenting ecosystem services as discreet and incomplete aspects of ecosystem functions not only allows potential economic and environmental benefits associated with ecosystem services, but also enables the social and political changes required to ensure valuation of ecosystem functions and related biodiversity in ways beyond their measurement on an economic scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System-of-systems approaches for integrated assessments have become prevalent in recent years. Such approaches integrate a variety of models from different disciplines and modeling paradigms to represent a socio-environmental (or social-ecological) system aiming to holistically inform policy and decision-making processes. Central to the system-of-systems approaches is the representation of systems in a multi-tier framework with nested scales. Current modeling paradigms, however, have disciplinary-specific lineage, leading to inconsistencies in the conceptualization and integration of socio-environmental systems. In this paper, a multidisciplinary team of researchers, from engineering, natural and social sciences, have come together to detail socio-technical practices and challenges that arise in the consideration of scale throughout the socio-environmental modeling process. We identify key paths forward, focused on explicit consideration of scale and uncertainty, strengthening interdisciplinary communication, and improvement of the documentation process. We call for a grand vision (and commensurate funding) for holistic system-of-systems research that engages researchers, stakeholders, and policy makers in a multi-tiered process for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions to major socio-environmental problems. • Scale incompatibilities among system representations are a key challenge in socio-environmental systems modeling. • Issues of scale arise from the complexity, size and heterogeneity of the constituent systems and their interactions. • A more holistic systems-of-systems modeling framework is needed within which to integrate current approaches and tools. • Socio-technical considerations for system-of-systems modeling is presented from a range of disciplinary perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation policy sits at the nexus of natural science and politics. On the one hand, conservation scientists strive to maintain scientific credibility by emphasizing that their research findings are the result of disinterested observations of reality. On the other hand, conservation scientists are committed to conservation even if they do not advocate a particular policy. The professional conservation literature offers guidance on negotiating the relationship between scientific objectivity and political advocacy without damaging conservation science's credibility. The value of this guidance, however, may be restricted by limited recognition of credibility's multidimensionality and emergent nature: it emerges through perceptions of expertise, goodwill, and trustworthiness. We used content analysis of the literature to determine how credibility is framed in conservation science as it relates to apparent contradictions between science and advocacy. Credibility typically was framed as a static entity lacking dimensionality. Authors identified expertise or trustworthiness as important, but rarely mentioned goodwill. They usually did not identify expertise, goodwill, or trustworthiness as dimensions of credibility or recognize interactions among these 3 dimensions of credibility. This oversimplification may limit the ability of conservation scientists to contribute to biodiversity conservation. Accounting for the emergent quality and multidimensionality of credibility should enable conservation scientists to advance biodiversity conservation more effectively., (© 2015 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.)