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Political parties are crucial in crafting effective national climate policies in democratic states. At the same time, there is a practical and academic debate of whether political parties matter for policy output. This article speaks to this debate by investigating the link between what parties say and what parties do with respect to environmental issues. More concretely, it analyzes whether there is a connection between the degree of environmentalism expressed in parties' electoral manifestos and national environmental policy output. Theoretically, the article draws on existing research on program-to-policy linkages in general and for environmental issues specifically to argue that saliency of environmentalism in party manifestos shapes more stringent environmental policies. This argument is empirically tested by combining data on policy stringency with data on manifesto contents for 28 countries for the period 1990–2015. The findings corroborate the main hypothesis, which has implications for understanding the overall potential for political parties to structure national environmental politics. The article concludes by sketching broader implications for research on parties' ability to shape national environmental policy across political systems, and across partisan ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms often oppose costly public policy reforms—but under what conditions may they come to support such reforms? Previous scholarship has taken a predominantly static approach to the analysis of business positions. Here, we advance a dynamic theory of change in business policy positions that explains how business may shift from opposing to supporting new regulation over the course of multiple rounds of policymaking. We identify three sets of drivers and causal mechanisms behind business repositioning related to political, policy, and market change. We argue that political mechanisms can shift opposition to "strategic support" for reform, whereas policy and market mechanisms may shift opposition or strategic support toward "sincere support." We examine the reconfiguration of business interests and policy positions in the context of three decades of US climate politics, focusing on the oil and gas, electricity, and auto sectors. Our dynamic theory of business positions moves beyond the dualism that views business as either opposing or supporting public interest regulation. We thus advance our understanding of why initial business opposition can incrementally turn into strategic or sincere support for policy reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A correction to the article "Political Consequences of Green Policies: Evidence from Italy" published within the issue is presented.

At this historical moment, few terms are as charged and powerful as the omnipresent term environment. It has become a strategic tool for politics and theories alike, crossed the borders of the disciplines of biology and ecology, and left the manifold field of environmentalism. This article explores the first steps on this path of expansion, in which the term becomes an argumentative resource and achieves a plausibility that transforms it into a universal tool. It is not self-evident to describe ubiquitous media, cinematic spaces, or augmented realities as environments. To understand how the term gained this plausibility, it is necessary to distinguish it from two other terms: the French milieu and the German Umwelt. When these three terms substitute one another and are used as translations, they lose their historical specificity and depth, and three different theoretical and philosophical traditions merge into indifference. Consequently, a conceptual history of the term environment and its relation to milieu and Umwelt —as well as terms such as medium , atmosphere , ambiance , and climate —can help us to understand the potentials and dangers of the term's plausibility. In this sense, the article argues for a new perspective on epistemologies of surrounding that relate that which surrounds to that which is surrounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early days of American expansion were categorized by policies that emphasized resource extraction and utilization. In turn, these policies created major conflicts with overuse, ownership, and rehabilitation−many of which continue to this day. Now, the United States has begun to shift its focus to the next untapped frontier: outer space. As resource extraction in space grows more feasible, the United States has begun to shape a regulatory framework. In doing so, the United States is copying early American resource policy, leaving open the same gaps for conflicts arising from overuse, ownership disputes, and restoration. This paper analyzes historical American resource policies, the issues created therein, and how the United States is currently poised to make the same mistakes on a much larger scale. Lastly, this paper identifies several current international models that could be used to mitigate conflicts before they happen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dam removal in the United States is an increasingly attractive option for advocates of river restoration. We argue that dam removal in New England (United States) is a useful lens for examining state actors' capabilities to govern environmental processes. Our analytical framework builds off and integrates strategic-relational approaches (SRAs) to state power and those approaches more concerned with "peopling" the state through state agents' everyday encounters with civil society. The complex suite of issues—ranging from safety and the environmental benefits of free-flowing rivers to historical preservation and cultural heritage—characterizing dam removal and similar restoration efforts challenge state agents to become more multidimensional in environmental governance. Our research reveals that some state agencies in New England have been more effective than others at adopting these novel roles and managing environmental conflicts. Our research also suggests we view the "state" as a complex collective of relations and actors that exerts power over nature–society relations in strategic and often contradictory ways. Our empirical findings, coupled to more nuanced theories of state–nature relations, direct attention to how state power is unevenly distributed within environmental governance arrangements. These findings also suggest that consideration of environmental interventions directed by state agents has the potential to contribute to a progressive and ecologically mindful set of political commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how states organize themselves internally to address climate change. Topics covered include the definitional categories for climate institutions, the ways that states address three core climate governance challenges, including through coordination, building consensus, and strategy development, and the ways that institutions and national political contexts influence and shape each other.

The construction of eco-city is in full swing at home and abroad, and scholars all over the world have done a lot of research on it. Building an eco-civilized city is to realize the harmonious interaction between human and nature, and to constitute a new settlement system with an ecological, harmonious, and virtuous cycle. The construction of this new settlement system requires the participation of all subjects, emphasizing the co-construction of multi-subjects. However, domestic and foreign scholars have paid little attention on how to coordinate multi-subjects to build eco-civilized cities. Therefore, taking the construction of ecological civilization in the Wuhan East Lake High-tech Development Zone in China as an example, this paper establishes a 'cooperative construction mechanism with multi-element objects' based on the local government, enterprise, and the public. With this mechanism, we explore how to establish a cooperative construction mechanism among multi-subjects and how to implement this mechanism in the construction of eco-civilized cities, which is the core of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most countries struggle to implement CO2 reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade‐off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade‐offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs' constituency adherence in a difference‐in‐differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade‐offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a 'window of opportunity' for advocates of the ' green shift'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a first attempt to systematically examine policy design and its influence on policy effectiveness in a comparative perspective. We begin by providing a novel concept and measure of policy design. Our Average Instrument Diversity (AID) index captures whether governments tend to reuse the same policy instruments and instrument combinations or produce policy solutions that are carefully tailored to the policy problem at hand. Second, we demonstrate that our AID index is a valid and reliable measure of policy design quality with a strong explanatory power for the outcome variables tested. Analyzing the composition of environmental policy portfolios in 21 OECD countries, we show that higher levels of AID are positively associated with a country's policy effectiveness in environmental matters. Based on this finding, we analyze, in a third step, the factors that lead countries to adopt more or less diverse policy portfolios. We find that the policy design quality is significantly improved when policy makers are not bound by high institutional constraints and, more importantly, are backed by well-equipped bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This 'In Brief' article analyses the 2020 US national election (presidential and congressional) and its implications for environment and climate policy in the US and globally. Drawing on insights from electoral politics, partisanship and executive power, it explores three broad areas: the issues at stake during the campaign and the centrality of climate, explanations for the outcome, and reflections on what lies ahead for the US role under a Biden Presidency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the polarisation of climate politics feeds into 'post-truth' politics, one response has been a call for the reassertion of a previously agreed upon 'reality'. However, it is important to recognise that knowledge has always been contested and contingent. This is particularly salient concerning climate change, where multiple truth claims compete in the media, politics, and social movements. One means of addressing this is through deliberation, where it is argued that emotional interpretations of information and lack of trust in authority can be alleviated through transparent democratic processes. Investigating a case study of climate change adaptation in a regional Australian community, we argue that while deliberation may be the preferred method of building community support, emotions can also be employed to undermine scientific authority and build a shared truth among those who see themselves as victims of the process. To this end, we suggest that more radically democratic models are needed to address climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates how interpretive feedback functions as an intervening mechanism during policy implementation that helps explain variation in subnational climate policy entrenchment. We examine three interrelated climate policy processes in Ontario, Canada from 2001–2018: a coal phase-out (2001–2014), the feed-in-tarriff (FIT) program for renewable energy (2006–2013) and a cap-and-trade program (2008–2018). Successful framing of the coal phase-out in terms of gains for both public health and climate change helped generate a broad-based coalition of support during implementation. Conversely, we find that the FIT and the cap-and-trade programs were vulnerable to framing around losses, especially regarding electricity rates and household costs, which counter-coalitions used to weaken public support during implementation. Our analysis demonstrates that building supportive coalitions for climate policy goes beyond the material gains and losses generated by initial policy designs. Framing strategies interact with policy designs over time to support or undermine policy durability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circular economy (CE) is currently generating considerable expectations. The concept describes an aspired future but does not provide clear guidance for policy-making. As policy outcomes often rest on initiatives generated in a bottom-up fashion, our attention must be directed to the ways policies are made accessible and interesting to those who might take the initiative. We claim that on-line publicity plays a key role in this. Our findings from a hyperlink analysis focusing on a government funding call for nutrient recycling in Finland show how multiple versions of the policy topic unfold online, as emergent hyperlink clusters prioritize specific agents, material circuits, and policy visions over others. The topic becomes connected with activities and agendas to create path dependencies and to strengthen existing divisions rather than to advocate change. Thus, we argue that CE policy design must recognize the way policy is shaped through online publicity creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China and Russia provide critical insights into the nature of environmental politics under authoritarian governments. Developing a paired comparison of activism over waste management in both countries, we explore how environmental civil society interacts with the state and mobilizes social support. We find that despite greater political liberalization, NGOs in hybrid states such as Russia can still find it highly challenging to resist state pressure and introduce policy changes. In contrast, China, notwithstanding its harsher authoritarian system and the use of more repressive measures against social activism, can still be tested by a well-strategized NGO alliance. We challenge the linear logic of existing theories on environmental politics, which assume that social movements are all moving towards a defined end point (e.g. liberal democracy), and argue that environmental politics under authoritarian regimes is both dynamic and contested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A just and sustainable energy transition will require not only new fuels, but new energy stories. The dominant, 'fossil' myth of energy, depoliticizes the forward march of energy intensity over human history. Instead, we need energy stories that more fully account for the role of political domination in major energy transitions of the past. Fossil domination is historically unique in its marriage of racial capitalism and imperialism, but it may also reflect broader patterns of fuel transition. I draw upon recent research on two momentous energy transitions – the rise of grain states and fossil fuel empires – that show how political innovations in labor extraction and domination were the main catalysts for transition, rather than superior fuel technologies or a public thirst for more energy. Emphasizing the role of domination across energy history disrupts the fossil myth, while also making space for more transformative energy stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the role of social movements and environmental organizations in crafting contingent coalitions to advance renewable energies in Chile. Until recently, Chile presented several conditions predicting the continuation of an arm's‐length energy policy and a deregulated energy market heavily concentrated on environmentally and socially unfriendly sources. However, gradual but transformative policy change in the last decade has made the country a world leader in renewable energy development. Studying two key moments in energy policy reform, we argue that the contingency of the coalitions that social movements and environmental organizations forged was crucial to the advancement of renewable energy policy and the transformation of the energy sector in the country. The paper advances our understanding of policy change in contexts of high path dependency and status quo bias, and builds the concept of "contingent coalitions," unifying similar but scattered and under‐theorized notions that capture the fluid dynamics of coalition formation and policy change in environmental policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change has rapidly expanded as a key topic of research across disciplines, but it has remained virtually untouched in nationalism studies. Climate change is a boundless, uncontainable phenomenon that ignores class, geographic, and ethnonational boundaries. As such, it can hardly be comprehended within the limits of a nationalist world vision. This article reassesses this intuition by focusing on the situational and adaptive plasticity of nationalism, characterized by its notorious Janus-faced adaptability. I first identify and address a methodological stumbling block that precludes scholars in some areas of the humanities and social sciences—specifically nationalism studies—from conceptualizing and grappling with this unfolding reality. Second, I advance a typology that can work as a conceptual grid for studying similar problems that emerge at the intersection of environmental politics, climate change, and nationalism studies. I suggest two ways in which the nation and national narratives have been and are being mobilized to make sense of, contrast, reject, and incorporate new life-changing trends. I identify these, respectively, under the umbrella terms resource nationalism and green nationalism. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing relevance of nationalism in plans for ongoing global energy transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines success of the green parties in Swiss federal elections of October 20, 2019. It reports the Green Party (GPS) won 13.2 percent and the Green Liberal Party (GLP) 7.8 percent of the votes, and two green forces together thus secured more than one fifth of the votes for the National Council, Switzerland's lower house of Parliament. It mentions although neither party was able to achieve representation in the government, their success has shaken the foundations of Swiss party politics and, if repeated, may see them enter government.

The article explores the concept and practice of regenerative culture drawing on our experience as activist researchers within Extinction Rebellion Manchester from August-December 2019. It defines relationship between regenerative culture and a foundation of self-care, people care and planet care. It reports how in 2018 in Great Britain Extinction Rebellion (XR) launched itself as a mass environmental movement aiming to achieve systemic change through non-violent civil disobedience. It mentions need of establishing a citizens assembly to oversee the transition towards climate justice.

Recent technological innovations in unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production have transformed the global energy landscape. The combination of hydraulic fracturing—commonly referred to as "fracking"—with horizontal drilling in shale plays across the United States has made the nation the top producer of both natural gas and petroleum, after a long hiatus from the top of the list. However, the public is largely marginalized from collective decisions about if, when, and where UOG production should occur. This marginalization occurs via lack of recognition and authentic participation as well as stymied community capacity to make decisions about zoning and regulating UOG production. The purpose of this article is to interrogate the procedural justice consequences of private participation for individual landowners as they: (1) negotiate leases with agents of oil and gas (O&G) companies and (2) work to have lease terms adequately followed by industry. To do this, we draw on over 100 interviews with Colorado and Pennsylvania citizens who have participated in private negotiations with the O&G industry regarding development of their land or minerals. Using these data and an environmental justice lens, we argue that meta-power—the power to structure the conditions of social contexts—frames negotiations between corporate actors and members of the public, shaping the outcomes of these interactions toward development and away from authentic participation by community members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • There is remarkable subnational variation in the implementation of forest legislation in the Argentine Chaco. • Pressures from large producers and conservationist coalitions shape governors' design and enforcement choices. • When conservationist coalitions are strong, governors design more stringent regulations regardless of producers' power. • When large producers are powerful, governors design flawed regulations and/or do not enforce regulations. Abstract In a context of booming commodity prices, what factors drive subnational authorities to implement forest protection regulations in active agricultural frontiers?. Focusing on one of the world's deforestation hotspots, the Argentine Chaco Forest, we argue that subnational variation in the implementation of forest protection legislation is driven by governors' attempts to avoid conflict produced by agricultural expansion. Through process tracing, we show how governors' implementation decisions—regarding both the design and enforcement of provincial regulations—sought to mitigate pressures from large producers opposed to clearing restrictions and from various groups contesting agricultural expansion. As the power of these actors varies across provinces, governors' conflict avoidance strategies resulted in markedly different subnational regulations as well as contrasting levels of enforcement and deforestation. We substantiate our argument through an empirical strategy that combines department-level geocoded data on deforestation and levels of forest protection in the Argentine Chaco with extensive fieldwork and interviews in the core provinces in which the forest is located. Our findings aim to contribute to academic debates in political science and environmental science on the determinants of subnational policy and deforestation, respectively, and have the potential to inform both donors and policymakers about the factors shaping the uneven impact of decentralized arrangements to combat climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy evaluation has grown significantly in the EU environmental sector since the 1990s. In identifying and exploring the putative drivers behind its rise - a desire to learn, a quest for greater accountability, and a wish to manipulate political opportunity structures - new ground is broken by examining how and why the existing literatures on these drivers have largely studied them in isolation. The complementarities and potential tensions between the three drivers are then addressed in order to advance existing research, drawing on emerging empirical examples in climate policy, a very dynamic area of evaluation activity in the EU. The conclusions suggest that future studies should explore the interactions between the three drivers to open up new and exciting research opportunities in order to comprehend contemporary environmental policy and politics in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has had a profound effect upon its members' environmental policy. Even in the United Kingdom (UK), the EU's most recalcitrant member state (historically labeled the 'Dirty man of Europe'), environmental policy has been Europeanised. As the UK moves to the EU's exit door it is timely to assess the utility of Europeanisation for understanding policy dynamics in the UK. Drawing upon interviews and extensive engagement with stakeholders, this article analyses the potential impact of Brexit upon environmental policy and politics. The analytical toolkit offered by de-Europeanisation is developed to identify the factors that drive and inhibit de-Europeanisation processes, thereby providing insights that may be applicable in other settings. Disengagement and policy stagnation are presented as more likely environmental outcomes of Brexit, with capacity emerging as a central explanatory variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core themes and research questions of this volume, centred on the nature of environmental policy change in the European Union (EU), are laid out. An original heuristic framework to capture different dimensions, mechanisms and processes of policy change is presented. In order to contextualise the current situation, where EU policy scope has reached maturity and faces an uncertain future trajectory, EU environmental politics is divided into particular eras, looking closely at the nature of change in each period. This volume interrogates the extent to which change has occurred, the conditions or context within which it did/did not take place and the implications arising from stasis or change. The contributions to the volume are introduced and placed into the context of the broader trajectory of EU environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature about education’s role in realising a more sustainable world emphasises the importance of acknowledging democratic and political challenges in environmental and sustainability education (ESE). This article offers an empirically grounded theoretical and methodological contribution to future research on how ‘the political’ is introduced, handled and experienced in ESE practice. It presents an analytical method, ‘Political Move Analysis’, for investigating how educators’ actions open-up or close down a space for the political in learners’ meaning-making. The method has been developed through empirical case studies that allowed to identify a variety of ‘politicising’ and ‘de-politicising moves’ performed by educators. Through these moves, educators can engage in very diverse teaching practices which differently affect the direction of people’s meaning-making. These findings are theoretically discussed in view of how to understand the entanglement of the educative and the political in ESE. Prospects for future research and for inspiring teaching practice are pointed out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars in global environmental politics have contributed to the development of regional environmental governance (REG) research. This article contributes to the ongoing debate from an international relations perspective. It provides findings from a comprehensive qualitative comparative analysis of the six regional organic agriculture standards (OAS) in Europe, East Africa, the Pacific, Central America, and Asia. Building on research on norm localization, the analysis draws attention to interactions between the global and regional regulatory levels, regional issue-specific normative infrastructures, and the pooling of different sources of political authority by transnational entrepreneurs and regional agents. The analysis serves three purposes in the light of the ongoing debate on REG: (1) to conduct systematic comparative research; (2) to locate regional OAS within the context of conceptual debates about global norm and policy diffusion, critical norm research, policy mobilities, and comparative regionalism; and (3) to outline future areas of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian state Parliaments have recently enacted legislation responding to direct action protests in which protesters have disrupted forestry and mining activities by blocking roads, building tree houses, and locking themselves to machinery and structures. The High Court of Australia, in Brown v Tasmania [2017] HCA 43 considered a challenge to one of these Acts, the Workplaces (Protection from Protesters) Act 2014 (Tas), and determined that its primary provisions were invalid in their application to forestry land for being in breach of the constitutional freedom of political communication. This analysis piece examines Brown v Tasmania by reference to two features of its context: the direct action protests that prompted the Tasmanian Parliament to enact this legislation and the documentary activism that occurred on the facts of Brown v Tasmania. It highlights that broad and uncertain protest laws risk being characterised as insufficiently adapted to the protection of political communication in Australian constitutional law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using policy cycle model as a heuristic, this article studies Indian, Brazilian, and South African engagement with Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) by (a) comparing NAMA policy process and (b) identifying factors driving or limiting the framework’s domestic application. India largely remained uninterested in NAMAs, Brazil aligned its domestic climate policy and NAMAs, while South Africa had a more nuanced engagement when formulating NAMAs. Four factors influenced these countries’ NAMA engagements: the level and necessity of international support, the availability of domestic policy provisions to tackle climate change, the domestic institutional capacity to coordinate interministerial functioning, and the role of individuals in the institutional apparatus. As an international climate policy framework, studying NAMA engagement provides learnings for nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement for designing the instrument, ensuring clarity on support provisions for ratcheting up ambitions, and enhancing institutional capacity, to expedite transition from policy formulation to implementation and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates seafood in the larger intersection between global environmental governance and the food system. Drawing inspiration from the food regimes approach, we trace the historical unfolding of the seafood system and its management between the 1930s and the 2010s. In doing so, we bridge global environmental politics research that has studied either the politics of fisheries management or seafood sustainability governance, and we bring seafood and the fisheries crisis into food regimes scholarship. Our findings reveal that the seafood system has remained firmly dependent on the historical institutions of national seafood production systems and, particularly, on the state-based regulatory regimes that they promulgated in support of national economic and geopolitical interests. As such, seafood systems contribute to a broader, historicized understanding of the hybrid global environmental governance of food systems in which nonstate actors depend heavily upon, and in fact call for the strengthening of, state-based institutions. Our findings reveal that the contemporary private ordering of seafood governance solidifies the centrality of state-based institutions in the struggle for “sustainable” seafood and enables the continued expansionary, volume-driven extractivist logics that produced the fisheries crisis in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Donald Trump ran his campaign on an anti-federalist agenda. He asserted that the federal government was too large and that regulation was the key problem choking the economy. A large portion of the country agreed. Apparently, Trump's arguments especially resonated with voters in Republican led states. Polling did not accurately predict Trump's success in the 2016 Electoral College. To many, Donald Trump's election as President came as a great surprise. Traditional polling reported in the press did not predict Trump's electoral victory. Patterns in public response to some of President Obama's second term environmental health regulation more accurately predicted the electoral map. As the second term Obama EPA proposed additional regulation, resistance in the central United States grew. This Article tracks the legal reaction of states across the country to Obama second term regulations governing shale oil and gas extraction (what the public calls "fracking"), the rule revising the definition of "Waters of the United States," and the "Clean Power Plan."2 The Article demonstrates that with each new regulation, opposition to the Obama environmental plan grew. The map of state reaction to the Clean Power Plan (the final rule in the suite of rules examined) shows a map that resembles, if not mirrors, the November 2016 electoral map. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to natural resources creates a political conflict between the expected economic winners and their environmental opponents, but the effects of such conflict on policy and politics remain unclear. To examine the scope of such effects, we exploit the rapid and unanticipated technological breakthroughs in the "fracking" of shale gas. During the past decade, shale gas production around the Marcellus Shale formation in the Northeastern United States expanded rapidly. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examine how access to shale gas in electoral districts changed the voting record of House Representatives on environmental policy relative to neighboring districts without access. Votes become 15-20 percentage points less likely to be in favor of the environment. The best explanation for this effect is the strong electoral performance of (anti-environmental) Republicans in shale-affected districts. The narrow conflict has a broad impact: access to natural resources puts downward pressure on environmental policy across the board. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article presents an interview with Paul N. Edwards and Oliver Geden on climate change and global warming. Topics of conversation include the environmental and political impacts of the potential decision by U.S. president Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris Accord climate agreement, Peter Galison's "trading zone" model of climate change simulation, and replacement of the Cold War theory of containment.

The article examines the North versus South debate in global environmental politics. Topics discussed include the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2009, the challenges that environmental change presents for the vulnerable countries, and the continued disagreement over who should bear the responsibility of the environmental damages.

The article discusses the impact of Paris Agreement to the international governance in addressing the issue of climate change, and offers information on the top-down approach highlighting governance system inherent weaknesses.

An introduction is presented in which topics within the issue are discussed which includes environmental governance, accountability in governance and global politics.

Co-management is an effective tool through which Alaska Native communities can pursue self-governance and self-determination in regards to marine mammal resources. In the Arctic, co-management typically aims to promote environmental conservation, sustainable resource use, and equitable sharing of resource-related benefits and responsibilities. This paper traces a variety of co-management regimes and other international management frameworks, and posits that co-management of subsistence resources is not just a legal issue or a governance issue, but rather, it is an issue of human rights and environmental justice. It concludes that co-management regimes are most successful when they integrate frameworks for shared responsibility, and build long-term relationships on mutual trust and strong legal agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the potential to apply legal and policy instruments from the 'First Pole', (the Arctic), to the 'Third Pole,' (the Himalayas/Tibetan Plateau) – the Antarctic is the 'Second Pole.' The Third Pole shares many environmental challenges with the Arctic: territorially both are comprised of nation states with domestic agendas; the issues of climate change, development and energy security are also common to both, and have transboundary dimensions. While acknowledging the contextual differences between Arctic states in the North and those with territory in the highest part of Asia (and the world), the growing relationship between them, institutions which regulate their affairs, and these shared challenges suggest there is opportunity to develop Third Pole environmental governance. The article reviews Arctic Council arrangements, focusing upon the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, and South Asia Cooperative Environment Program as reform platforms. It finds potential exists if political will is forthcoming, particularly on the part of China and India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deliberative forms of stakeholder participation have been widely embraced as a key measure for addressing legitimacy deficits and non-compliance in environmental governance. However, the great significance of such collaborative structures for state-stakeholder interaction is much too often accepted uncritically as an established truth in the environmental policy discourse. Building on examples from the literature on fisheries co-governance, this article constructs a conceptual and normative framework for interpreting and assessing such views about co-governance, legitimacy and compliance. Analysing central claims in this discourse in relation to different concepts and standards of legitimacy helps us identify and distinguish many powerful reasons to welcome co-governance. However, the article defends the need to do so cautiously and reflectively. It is conceptually misleading to suggest that more intense forms of co-governance will generally improve the overall level of social legitimacy and, thereby, compliance rates among stakeholders. Furthermore, it is argued that the democratic value of co-governance is not fundamental. The democratic desirability of such arrangements should be primarily assessed on instrumental-pragmatic grounds, focusing on their capacity to serve the wider ideals of equal citizenship and public reason. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Climate change is predicted to lead to an increasing frequency of natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies, yet scholars have not examined how the humanitarian community is responding to this issue. This article examines its initial engagement with the climate change regime and finds it was remarkably coordinated. Humanitarian agencies coauthored submissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the leaders of major humanitarian organizations spoke on co-organized panels on the humanitarian perils of climate change. In fact, the overarching trend was cooperation, not competition, among humanitarian agencies. This is an intriguing finding as it runs counter to the dominant account of a humanitarian marketplace in which actors are constantly competing for resources. Instead, this article suggests that the Inter-Agency Standing Committee played a significant role in mobilizing and coordinating humanitarian organizations' initial efforts. It highlights how and to what extent institutionalized cooperation between international organizations enables further cooperation in new issue areas and regimes. Scholars of international organizations, global environmental politics, and humanitarianism will be interested in how cooperation emerged in the humanitarian regime and shaped subsequent interaction with the climate change regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have a key role to play in the process of climate adaptation, through the development and implementation of public policy. Governments have access to a diverse array of instruments that can be employed to adapt their operations and influence the behaviour of individuals, organizations, and other governments. However, the choice of policy instrument is political, because it affects the distribution of benefits and costs, and entrenches institutional procedures and resources that are difficult to redeploy. This article identifies four key governing resources that governments employ in the service of adaptation and analyses these resources using criteria drawn from the policy studies literature. For each category, specific policy instruments are described, and examples are provided to illustrate how they have been used in particular jurisdictions. The article also discusses instrument selection, focusing on trade-offs among the instrument attributes, processes for setting the stage for instrument choice, jurisdictional constraints on instrument selection, and ways to avoid negative vertical and horizontal policy interplay. Policy relevance Adaptation is a nascent field of public policy, and courses of action to reduce vulnerability and build adaptive capacity are in their infancy. This article contributes to policy development and analysis by identifying the range of policy instruments available to governments and analysing concrete ways in which they are employed to implement adaptation policy objectives. Taking stock of these adaptation tools and comparing their behavioural assumptions and attributes helps to illuminate potential policy options, and to evaluate their technical viability, political acceptability, and economic feasibility. Providing examples of how these instruments have been implemented successfully in other jurisdictions offers ideas and lessons for public officials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the incident of the scuttling of the USS Le Baron Russell Briggs, loaded with roughly 22,000 tons of outdated chemical weapons in 1970, this contribution extrapolates how, why, and when in the United States chemical weapons that had been produced as the ultimate answer to the risk of nuclear war became reframed as a risk themselves. The analysis settles on how questions of knowing and not-knowing about potentialities of future events influenced these renegotiation processes between the myriad actors involved such as the US military, politicians, environmentalists, Anti-Vietnam activists, and the American public. Beyond analyzing historic examples of risk assessment and management, this contribution also demonstrates how we can read the history of the Cold War as a history or risk. I argue that studying the controversy of operation CHASE 13, the sinking of the SS L. B. Briggs, from a risk perspective opens up new avenues into understanding the Cold War from a social and cultural perspective while integrating political and environmental history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]