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How enabled is civil society in the Philippines' local environmental management scene? A systematic review with predetermined criteria identified 21 studies that describe the contributing roles of civil society organizations (CSOs) in their environmental initiatives. The review reveals that CSOs in the Philippines take roles as Advocate, Giver, Mediator, and Partner. Key enabling indicators influencing their effectiveness include their ability in providing mutual benefits, engaging operationally, resolving conflicts proactively, adapting to dynamic settings, incorporating local knowledge, building social trust, and harmonizing stakeholder knowledge. Despite their strong potential, CSOs in the country face challenges such as divergent stakeholder interests, bureaucratic weaknesses, community unacceptability, weak local tourism control, biodiversity blind spots, and legal resistance. Understanding the dynamics of CSO engagement leverages their strengths while addressing their barriers to realize their full potential as actors in local environmental management. This study provides valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners seeking to enhance CSO engagement in the Philippines and within the broader discourse of sustainable development in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention to inequality is increasingly taking centerstage in the fight against climate change and environmental devastation. More and more scholars and activists emphasize the need to put the reduction of inequality at the core of environmental and climate politics, and more and more propose a (socially just) "sufficiency" approach and politics to do so. Just sufficiency is presented as the new desirable societal pact, tasked with taking over from the current dominant growth pact driving "excess," and replacing it with a politics of "enough," through "collectively defined self-limitation." However, an excess/enough lens misses the dynamics of production of inequality in the first place, with important political implications. This article thus seeks to contribute a tighter critical theoretical understanding of the inequality-unsustainability relation as a nexus historically powered by specific mechanisms of fossil, metabolic, as well as "green" accumulation. Through the theorization of these relations, one can better apprehend how inequality is not only a question of unfair distribution or exclusion from affluence demanding to be addressed through social and environmental justice, but also the condition for the modes of extraction and exploitation that produce and reproduce unsustainability. I argue that the counterhegemonic struggle must be waged on that terrain: putting limitations (not self-limitations) on the accumulation machine and its inequality-unsustainability nexus. This reading, which builds on critical theory and Marxist and feminist political ecology, is related to notions of class as structured not only by exploitation, but also, crucially by dispossession and status hierarchization. Adopting a nexus approach to inequality and unsustainability offers a critical theoretical method that can hopefully shift the assessments and orientations of the sufficiency movement away from the moral terrain of self-limitation (whose self?) toward the class politics of limits on capital needed today for socio-ecological transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

\nHIGHLIGHTSThe term modernity refers to both a historical phenomenon and a discourse that contains environmentally harmful conceptions. One of the main schools of thought in green politics critiques this rhetoric from a poststructuralist perspective and links ecological degradation to modernity. Given this context, this study examined the discourses of 32 different television car advertisements by applying critical discourse analysis, from 1970s to the early 2010s for two of Turkiye's most popular car brands, Fiat-Tofas and Renault. Poststructuralists argue that discourses of speed, power, challenging nature, mobility, and freedom promote consumption, thereby increasing ecological degradation. These crucial themes were also essential components in the analysed Turkish television car advertisements. Another common motif was patriarchal language. In conclusion, the analysis demonstrates that the discourses criticised by green political thinkers are not exclusive to Western societies but are prevalent in diverse cultural contexts, manifesting in various forms. The car becomes an entertainment space, provides a private sphere for its owners.Turkish commercials portray cars as desirable places to be in the now.Commercials tend to stereotype women as weak and susceptible.Owning a car becomes a significant means of upward social mobilisation.Car advertising in Turkiye both reflects and constructs social inequalities.The car becomes an entertainment space, provides a private sphere for its owners.Turkish commercials portray cars as desirable places to be in the now.Commercials tend to stereotype women as weak and susceptible.Owning a car becomes a significant means of upward social mobilisation.Car advertising in Turkiye both reflects and constructs social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate politics is old: a stress test of international institutions and political systems now in its fourth decade. Climate politics is also new: nascent transnational movements, world changing technologies, and emergent authoritarianisms indicate a rapidly shifting geopolitical order. As the moral urgency of environmental crises intensify, attention to religion provides an informative window onto the dynamics of global environmental politics. This article describes three ways in which religions are both shaping and being shaped by anthropogenic climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO2$_2$, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO2$_2$ emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income affects support for carbon taxation. While carbon taxation is widely advocated as the most efficient policy for mitigating climate change, it faces significant political hurdles due to its distributional costs. Using original survey data, with an embedded experiment, we find that providing information about the actual distribution of household CO2$_2$ emissions by income significantly changes individuals' support for carbon taxation. These effects are particularly pronounced at the bottom of the household income distribution, leading to increased support for costly climate policies. However, individuals who believe that carbon taxes will reduce their income continue to hold their level of support for carbon taxation. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the public's response to the distributional consequences of the green transitions and ultimately their political feasibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article confronts strands of thought in environmental ethics with environmental economics. Three approaches in ethics are addressed: that pointing to the rights of individual natural entities, the holistic approach, and the relational approach of Human and Nature. They are confronted with three strands of thought in environmental economics: the welfare economics approach, the biophysical-centric approach, the relational economic approach. The confrontation of ethics and environmental economics allow us to draw some insights both for academic research and environmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Which types of international institutions display higher ability to change states' behaviour? This article assesses the relative environmental effectiveness of a management-based ('soft') and an enforcement-based ('hard') international agreement: the United Nations Sofia Protocol and a European Union directive. Using difference-in-differences analysis, we find that the European Union directive is more effective in inducing emissions reductions than the United Nation's Sofia Protocol. We propose that the European Union's enforcement capacity is a likely driver of the directive's effectiveness. The article makes two contributions to existing literature. First, we provide causal evidence on the relative importance of overlapping international institutions in regulating environmental policy outcomes, elucidating how an apparent emissions-reducing effect of a 'soft' United Nations Protocol is in fact driven by the existence of overlapping 'hard' European Union regulation. Second, we demonstrate how states' enthusiasm for emissions regulations can explain the relative effectiveness of soft and hard law institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an analysis of the leaders' backgrounds shaping their decisions towards environmental policy outcomes of nascent democracies such as countries in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on leaders' traits and socio-economic conditions. Drawing on factors that influence a leader's decision-making process, including external factors such as social and economic and internal factors (cognitive or traits), this study explores the variation of quality of environmental policy outcomes in Southeast Asian countries. Our findings suggest that the level of development negatively affects environmental policy outcomes, while democratic conditions do not play a significant role. We also find that leaders' age and level of education negatively affect environmental policy outcomes, whereas gender is not correlated with the quality of the environment. This research provides valuable insights into the environmental policy landscape of Southeast Asia and offers recommendations for policymakers seeking to enhance environmental policy outcomes in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have undertaken much conceptual development of "polycentric" climate governance (PCG). Yet, there has been limited empirical examination of whether this descriptive, analytical, and normative concept can aid climate change mitigation; it may even undermine our efforts in certain contexts. Thus this special issue examines the empirical realities of PCG. Building from a shared definition of the concept, the constitutive articles analyze an exploratory range of systems, across policy styles, governance levels, and types of actors. Here we consolidate the findings of the articles by identifying five key themes that are drawn from across the special issue, for consideration in future research. These themes are operationalization of PCG systems; voluntary action; temporality; power; and, crucially, effectiveness in mitigating climate change. Our findings provide evidence from a wide range of contexts, from which we build to propose new research streams on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecofascism is an ideology that attempts to ground the fascist political project on a strongly 'natural' basis. Whilst still inchoate and not yet a mainstream political movement, it is an increasingly influential ideology in far-right circles, motivating a number of acts of political violence. This article uses Australian author David Ireland's last novel The World Repair Video Game to explore the structure and constituent elements of ecofascist ideology, and how this is manifested spatially in the literary world of the novel. Using a structural Marxist understanding of literature as a fashioning of ideology, the article argues that, through aesthetic means, Ireland is able to project an ecofascist future that runs ahead of its material reality. In so doing, Ireland plots how a future ecofascism might synergise an essentialist link between the natural and social worlds, hatred towards those who resist the neoliberal link between labour and human worth, extreme violence and a deep, genuine nature worship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban river restoration efforts are growing worldwide. Along with restoring and conserving rivers, riverside land is slated for public recreation, property development, and infrastructure for adaptation to climate change. Riverine landscapes, embedded in larger watershed ecosystems and claimed by multiple communities, are sites of contested planning in contemporary cities. In this paper, we advance the scholarship on contestation over control and access of urban rivers and floodplains by analyzing the role of river restorative legislation and water-centered planning in managing Turag, an urban river in Bangladesh. While river degradation in urbanizing regions is often ascribed to lack of regulatory controls and enforcement, we argue that restorative legislation and interventions facilitate Turag River's ecocide by processes of territorialization. Territorialization refers to the co-constitutive dynamics of river restorative legislations and interventions as well as planned infrastructure and land use changes, which erase and displace river-based communities with reciprocal relations to the river. Riverine livelihoods and lifemaking, among fishing and farming communities in the case of Turag, are erased from planning and restoration practices, and are consequently expelled from the expanding city. Drawing on qualitative and counter-cartographic investigation of one severely polluted urban river in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we show how territorialization materializes through five co-constitutive dynamics involving environmental legislation, encroachment reporting, river demarcation, encroachment evictions, and wetland to land conversions. We draw out critical implications of how river restoration can be just and advance a riverine urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the concept of 'attachment' to examine pro-coal sentiment in Whitehaven – an English town at the centre of global political controversy because of a plan to open a coal mine in the area. Drawing on fieldwork data, I show that pro-mine persuasions among some residents are underpinned by a process of 're-attaching' to coal. I argue that the case of the Whitehaven mine is a warning about how fossil fuels might re-emerge as promissory objects in other parts of the world, even when a transition away from fossil fuels has been completed. Paradoxically, the very disorientations and deepening traumas that climate change is causing threaten to spur on the rise of fossil fuel (re-)attachments. The paper also examines how pro-coal discourses linked to wider vested interests are received in a context where coal exists as 'afterlife'. Consequently, local actors construct narratives that legitimise new coal extraction by (re)articulating discourses of delay. My findings are thus a reminder of the need to guard against over-valorising 'the grassroots', arguably a risk in environmental justice scholarship. I conclude by calling for further empirical research on the way attachments to high-carbon objects are (re/de)composed, an urgent task given the need for rapid societal decarbonisation – one which has received very little attention to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adverse health and economic impacts of air pollution in China have been well documented, but few studies have examined how air pollution may affect people’s political trust in their government. From an expectation-performance perspective, we argue that air pollution makes Chinese citizens feel that their basic needs and well-being are under-protected by the government, thereby dampening their political trust. Empirically, we employ a unique dataset (n=3,972) that merges national public opinion survey with satellite-derived ground-level air pollution data to test our argument. Our analyses show that worsening air pollution significantly taints Chinese people’s trust in the government, while the absolute level of local air pollution also erodes their political trust through raised environmental concern and lowered policy satisfaction. Our research adds knowledge to the links from air pollution to people’s political trust in China and sheds new light on future studies of environmental politics and governance elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, the state apparatus is increasingly used towards green ambitions. While the 'green state' concept captures this universal phenomenon, the literature on it is largely limited to Western countries. Here, I assess the green state concept's ability to reflect the global plurality of potential green states. I do so by testing the two assumed preconditions that currently delimit the green state's scope to the West: mature democratic institutions and high state capacity. Through a two-dimensional continuum of political institutions and state capacity, I present a dynamic and fluid framework of four categories, providing a theoretical scaffolding for broadening the scope to encompass the Global South. As a basis for the analysis, I distil the broad literature on the green state concept into a definition encompassing both a normative ideal that countries can strive towards as well as an analytical tool for assessing countries' empirical green performance. From that, I show that green states can exist without either assumed precondition and that the literature therefore arbitrarily excludes the Global South from the green state concept. This finding gives impetus to an emerging research area that answers calls to move beyond Western-centrism and integrate the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a global challenge that is complex and has wide-reaching impacts. Governments play an essential role in tackling climate change through adaptive policies and promoting the development of environmentally friendly alternatives. In addition, global researchers are also required to contribute through research results on government policies on climate change issues. That encourages this study to analyze global research results related to government policies on climate change issues. This study uses bibliometric analysis with data from the Scopus database, chosen because of its high standards in global acceptance of journals and research documents. The analysis was primarily carried out using Vosviewer with a focus on co-occurrence, alongside manual visualization of the Scopus database, to provide a more complete picture of trends, collaboration patterns and research impact on government policy and climate change in the social sciences. The findings of this study indicate that research results provide an essential basis for the government to make more adaptive and effective policies for mitigation and adaptation actions related to climate change. This study also found several research gaps that other global researchers in the future could explore. Research gaps can guide further research in poorly understood areas, strengthening the understanding of climate change and broadening existing knowledge. It is also helpful in initiating an idea that stakeholders, especially the government, can study. However, this study also found an imbalance in the number of published documents by researchers outside American and European affiliates. This study encourages research results from other researchers, especially those affiliated with Asia and Africa. It can help find a new perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attention to inequality is increasingly taking centerstage in the fight against climate change and environmental devastation. More and more scholars and activists emphasize the need to put the reduction of inequality at the core of environmental and climate politics, and more and more propose a (socially just) “sufficiency” approach and politics to do so. Just sufficiency is presented as the new desirable societal pact, tasked with taking over from the current dominant growth pact driving “excess,” and replacing it with a politics of “enough,” through “collectively defined self-limitation.” However, an excess/enough lens misses the dynamics of production of inequality in the first place, with important political implications. This article thus seeks to contribute a tighter critical theoretical understanding of the inequality-unsustainability relation as a nexus historically powered by specific mechanisms of fossil, metabolic, as well as “green” accumulation. Through the theorization of these relations, one can better apprehend how inequality is not only a question of unfair distribution or exclusion from affluence demanding to be addressed through social and environmental justice, but also the condition for the modes of extraction and exploitation that produce and reproduce unsustainability. I argue that the counterhegemonic struggle must be waged on that terrain: putting limitations (not self-limitations) on the accumulation machine and its inequality-unsustainability nexus. This reading, which builds on critical theory and Marxist and feminist political ecology, is related to notions of class as structured not only by exploitation, but also, crucially by dispossession and status hierarchization. Adopting a nexus approach to inequality and unsustainability offers a critical theoretical method that can hopefully shift the assessments and orientations of the sufficiency movement away from the moral terrain of self-limitation (whose self?) toward the class politics of limits on capital needed today for socio-ecological transformation.

The politics of climate change in Australia remains highly fraught, this is despite the country experiencing acute impacts of a changing climate including mega-fires, floods, and severe and prolonged drought. Government inaction has led to limited market signals encouraging producers or consumers to move away from carbon intensive energy production to clean energy. In the absence of regulation, Australian shareholder activists are engaging directly with company boards and executives to reform corporate behaviour. This engagement, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) shareholder activism, has proliferated since 2017, much later than in comparable jurisdictions. Activists have targeted the mining, oil and gas, and finance sectors, due to their contribution to the Australian economy and their direct impact on global emissions. This paper explores the reasons for, and the implications of, the growth in ESG shareholder activism in Australia. It argues that the emergence of this activism in Australia was delayed due to complexities in the country's corporations' law. Regulatory attempts at stymying ESG shareholder activism resulted in the emergence of a duopoly of actors, at the cost of broader investor and civil society engagement. It is concluded that the rise of ESG shareholder activism in Australia is linked to growing tension between societal expectations, regulation, and the behaviour of firms. And, that ESG activists have been successful in leveraging this tension. There is evidence that large corporates have responded to activist claims, rendering this form of activism a potentially effective method for addressing some of the most pressing issues facing society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue examines environmental governance, conceptualized as environmental protections, support for sustainable development, and the regulation of large-scale development projects. Through analysis of dynamics during the commodities super-cycle of the 2000s–2010s, contributors explore the multifaceted ways that societal actors interact with the state to support, oppose, or modify environmental governance, with a focus on communities impacted by export activities and economic elites who favor their expansion. Several papers seek to understand the governance of sectors—mining, oil, and soy. Others begin with natural areas threatened by development—urban wetlands and forests. As a collection, the papers reveal three commonalities that affect the extent to which environmental governance institutions address demands of impacted communities: (1) the question of whether a policymaking process takes place in reaction to mobilizing, or whether it proactively engages environmental questions as they pertain to local populations; (2) strategies by civil society, and above all impacted residents, to ensure the implementation of environmental policies; and (3) debates over knowledge, including community efforts to harness expertise and information to counter paradigms advanced by business actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subnational implementation of forest protection legislation is an important aspect of forest governance. In this article, I explore how competing interests regarding production and conservation affect forest protection at the local level in the Argentine Chaco Forest, which represents 60 percent of the Chaco Americano, the second largest forest in South America. Employing original and administrative data, I assess whether deforestation is associated with large producers, who seek to expand soy cultivation into forestlands, and the presence of indigenous communities, who favor forest protection. Quantitative analysis of the departments in the Chaco region suggests that overall deforestation is associated with soy cultivation and past deforestation. In contrast, forest loss in protected areas, which should be zero but represents almost half of total deforestation during the studied period, is positively associated with the number of indigenous communities in the department, the share of protected forestlands, the power of large producers, and past deforestation. Qualitative analysis suggests that lands inhabited by indigenous communities were generally granted protected status, as requested by national legislation and consistent with demands of indigenous groups and their allies. Yet, this protected status has been watered down by permissive regulations and the overall lax enforcement of forest protection legislation, which were in turn driven by large producers invested in cropland expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States faces multiple political challenges to achieving the rapid cuts in carbon emissions called for by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among these are the long-standing issue of partisan polarization and the newly emerging problem of climate doom and defeatism. These challenges are not only barriers to agenda-setting and enactment, but can also threaten the durability of policies over time. This study uses a survey experiment from a nationally representative sample (n = 1760) to examine the impact of partisan cues and fatalistic rhetoric on support for the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. We find that Republicans and Independents exposed to Democratic Party cues expressed less support for the IRA. We also find that Independents respondents exposed to a fatalistic message had reduced support for the IRA. These findings underscore the importance of framing in the post-enactment period and suggest that the IRA may be vulnerable to retrenchment or reversal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses activist perceptions of the beneficial potentialities of new media for environmental campaigning as investigated in Australia, due to its high level of environmental activism and Internet usage. Drawing upon literature on communication theory, environmental politics, digital activism, and social movement theory, this study explores new media use for activism in two large Australia-wide environmental campaigns: contestation of old-growth forest logging and unconventional gas mining (fracking) development. From March to May 2017, 34 environmental activists involved in these campaigns were interviewed for this study. They shared their opinions on what it meant for them to use new media, the difficulties they encountered, but also the beneficial potentialities they identified in using these media for their activism. The study findings show that new media built significantly on more 'traditional' forms of activism, including stalls and non-violent street demonstrations, but also enabled extended activist outreach, enhanced engagement with supporters, and boosted campaign mobilisation. As such, despite an array of quite challenging limitations they also referred to, and to which they responded strategically, Australian environmental activists found new media highly beneficial to their activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

"DPR - Musikal" is a highly acclaimed and ambitious musical theater video created by SkinnyIndonesian24 (Jovial da Lopez & Andovi da Lopez) that features a compelling environmental message. This piece depicts the contested meaning of nature and how it is influenced by different interests in the DPR. This research will examine the environmental politics discourses present in "DPR - Musikal" as an artistic creation that establishes a connection between environmental concerns and the notion of power. The research employed a qualitative approach and utilized Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough. Data was gathered through video transcripts, direct interviews with informants (Jovial da Lopez), and additional documents. This research identifies two discourses in the piece: (1) sustainable development which reconciles the objectives of development agenda and environmental conservation, and (2) anti-capitalism which is identified through the narratives of land privatization, natural resources exploitation, and capitalism's dominance in policymaking within the Indonesian parliament. These two discourses represent contrasting political thoughts, hence confirming incohesive solutions to the environmental problems. Although the producers condemn the dominance of business power and the exploitation of nature, they do not present a radical opposition to capitalism. Instead, they exhibit a lenient stance towards the development agenda, thus exemplifying the dominant influence of capitalist ideology within the musical theater production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We shed new light on a long-standing question in political science: When confronted with costly policy choices, do citizens form their preferences using material (economic) concerns or other-regarding motivations, such as the distribution of costs, and how are these moderated by political ideology? Using the case of carbon taxation, a widely advocated policy solution to climate change, we conducted survey experiments in Germany and the United States to assess the relative importance of these forms of preferences. The results show that individuals are primarily concerned with how a carbon tax would affect their individual income. There are also important cross-national differences with high-income German respondents being more receptive to redistributive policy design, especially in contrast to high-income Democrats who significantly decrease support for carbon taxation. These findings highlight how the constituencies generated by new policies can significantly alter the distribution of mass support for action on emerging societal problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2014 is a notorious landmark for U.S. water policy. During that year, water crises in two Michigan cities – contamination in Flint and water service shutoffs in Detroit – brought renewed attention to the inadequacies of U.S. drinking water policy for ensuring access to safe and affordable water. The crises exposed the cities' shared economic challenges rooted in histories of disinvestment and racial inequality. The events drew national and international responses, in part from the hard work and political successes of local resident-activists, ultimately leading to state and federal level policy change. Ten years later, we see three ways the water crises in Flint and Detroit transformed the politics of U.S. water policy: greater visibility of water politics and infrastructures, greater focus on water access and affordability in addition to historic focus on quality, and greater attention to the racial dimensions of water policy decisions. These shifts are evident in federal and state policy and administrative agendas, political coalitions' priorities and strategies, and narratives of water policy in media coverage and public discourse. Despite historic progress and investment, the U.S. still lacks the necessary structures for comprehensive policy reform to ensure equitable access to safe drinking water, and public trust in water utilities is at an all-time low. Continuing to advance on water justice requires taking full advantage of the new landscape of water politics, including by engaging in scholarship and praxis that take intersectional approaches, and implementing policies that promote systemic reform rather than individual crisis response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study revisits the enduring question of temporality in environmental politics, drawing on prognostic politics literature to identify temporality as the practice of making and enacting time claims within institutions at various scales. The research highlights the intersection of time, environmental governance and politicisation within the procedural aspects of environmental impact assessments (EIA) during infrastructure development. The case of South Africa’s Thabametsi coal plant (2014–2017) is examined to understand how disputes over the duration of the Thabametsi EIA shaped interpretations and responses to potential environmental impacts. This case highlights a distinct politicisation of time marked by the strategic deployment of scale. While developers and regulators leveraged national-level legislation to expedite the EIA for uninterrupted project development, environmental activists, influenced by post-apartheid legal norms, enforced a more comprehensive and slow-paced EIA. By scaling down their legal arguments and focusing on project-specific regulations, the activists managed to induce significant delays in the coal plant’s realisation.

The available choices of political responses to disruption in the global climatic system depend in part on how the problem is conceptualized. Researchers and policymakers often invoke a "climate crisis" or "climate emergency," but such language fits poorly with current knowledge of the problem's physical causes and social impacts. This article argues that climate change is instead more like a political epic. It involves neither sudden onset, as in the concept of emergency, nor decisive resolution, as in the concept of crisis, but rather a protracted ordeal of (temporally) obscure origins and uncertain outcomes. This alternative ontology of climate change highlights its novel temporal properties, including unusually slow-moving or time-lagged causal dynamics, with unsettling implications for academic research on the climatic-institutional nexus. Normatively, it undermines arguments for democracies' environmental superiority over autocracies that rely on the former's general superiority at resolving crises and responding to emergencies. At the same time, some new arguments for democratic distributions of power become possible within the epic frame. More broadly, embracing the assumption of epic climate change may redirect attention from Promethean, managerial, or technocratic solutions to questions about which values or identities deserve preservation amid presumptively interminable and imperfectly remediable sources of disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pollution in the environment emerges as a legal and technical object on the one hand, and as a repository of social and cultural beliefs on the other. What happens when we trouble the idea that these belong to different domains and think about seemingly divergent meanings of pollution together? In this article, I draw from anti‐caste and anti‐racist work to explore this question. Extending critical urban scholarship on environmental politics, I attend to formations of caste and religion alongside judicial and political discourse on preventing pollution to the river Ganga in North India. In our present moment, on the banks of the sacred river, extremist leaders mobilize regulations to target minoritized Muslim and Dalit communities in Kanpur's leather industry. I argue that the roots of these actions lie in an environmental petition from the mid‐1980s which transformed urban environmental governance in North India, as the court decoupled questions of environmental protection from economic and social justice. I suggest that the analytic of regional racial formations helps us grapple with uneven socio‐spatial landscapes in postcolonial cities and sharpens our understanding of environmental injustices by moving beyond fixed categories of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many now argue that we should think about the previously unthinkable risks of climate change, including societal collapses and human extinction. Calamitous images of the future are not pathological or counterproductive: it is both necessary and valuable to imagine the worst-case scenarios of climate change. Critics of climate catastrophe often group together all visions of disastrous futures under labels like doomism or pessimism. This is unhelpful and greater nuance is required. We need to distinguish between climate doomists (who see catastrophe as imminent and unavoidable) and climate risk realists (who see catastrophe as one potential future that should be avoided). We also need to split apart the different ways of envisioning climate catastrophe to understand their distinct strengths and weaknesses. We outline and compare three alternative modes of viewing the worst-case scenarios of climate change: foresight, agitation, and fiction. The first centers on modeling catastrophic climate scenarios, the second on the use of images of climate catastrophe for political action, and the third on fictional visions of future climate disasters. These different approaches are complementary and should be better integrated to create more comprehensive models of the future. All of them would benefit from viewing the future as uncertain, reflecting on the social position of the author, and guarding against the authoritarian “stomp reflex” that can be induced by discussions of crisis and emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers and governments increasingly frame climate protection in terms of green growth, arguing that continued economic growth and climate protection are complementary and mutually beneficial. With such framing, governments hope to overcome the global common goods problem associated with climate change and to enable higher ambition on climate action within and across states. Yet, no empirical evidence to date has been provided on how widespread the support for green growth is in international climate politics. This paper, therefore, investigates which countries employ green growth framings at UNFCCC negotiations, and whether this relates to domestic factors, in particular economic structure, level of development and climate impacts. We conduct panel-data analysis on green growth positions derived from hand-coding a unique dataset of High-level Segment statements at the Convention of the Parties (COPs) from 2010 to 2019 for 151 countries. The results reveal that, to date, green growth proponents are those countries with the most advanced national clean energy technology (CET) capacities – as measured by the Green Complexity Index. The findings highlight that green growth is not promoted by all countries at international climate negotiations. In international climate negotiations, climate protection is increasingly framed as a green growth opportunity to motivate global ambition. Clean Energy Technology (CET) leading countries are more likely to use green growth framings than other less-technologically advanced peers and those with high exposure to climate risks. Mechanisms to support green growth pathways for all countries should be scaled up, including technology transfer and finance to foster local capacities and human capital. Given that green growth framings are not universally endorsed, further emphasis should be placed on additional co-benefits of climate action beyond economic growth, such as food and energy security, adaptation and resilience-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In urban and suburban areas, the complex socio-environmental landscapes and diverging interests of stakeholders make wildlife management difficult. We analyze how municipalities in Massachusetts make decisions about the management of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Combining statistical analyses of a survey of municipal officials, qualitative analysis of management documents, and semi-structured interviews, we investigate (i) the socio-environmental conditions linked to municipal concerns about deer, (ii) the concerns that prompt municipalities to explore deer management actions, and (iii) why some municipalities take management action while others do not. We find that landscape features, Lyme disease incidence, and an array of concerns about deer prompt municipal governments to explore options for deer management. We show that management champions and small-scale politics are crucial in translating concern to management action. Our study illustrates the complexity of wildlife decision-making in sub/urban environments where the movement of wild animals intersects with patterns of development and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories about the end of the world continue to pile up daily. There isn't any sense of respite from the litany of horrors we are presented with. The eerie atmosphere of ecological catastrophe colonises our political imaginations. Understanding how we collectively imagine the end of the world, and thus how we understand what is happening, why and how, as well as what we must and can do, is politically crucial. The vast tapestry of environmental crises makes the role of the imagination central; not only in terms of being able to know the crises, but in setting out what is concretely possible and what is cruel fantasy. This paper sets out to map the imaginary of ecological catastrophe as drawn from the body of non-fiction literature that fuels much contemporary environmental activism in the Global North. Taking up the work of a series of environmental writer-activists in order to outline the various refrains that comprise the core of the eco-catastrophic imaginary, I aim to sketch how the slow violence of the present is being narrated as a political event, and what possibilities for averting disaster appear possible. It is the argument of this paper that how we collectively imagine the cacophony of environmental disasters presently unfolding shapes the field of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of communication in environmental politics, with a specific focus on narratives and metaphors used to shape public understanding and policy decisions. It discusses the prevalence of narratives in political discourse and how they can personalize, integrate, exemplify, or polarize issues. The article also explores the narrative of "ecocide" in the Low Countries, which portrays environmental damage as a crime and draws on the personification of the ecosystem. It discusses the debates and controversies surrounding the recognition of ecocide in international and national arenas, particularly in Belgium. The article acknowledges the existence of counter-narratives and the complexities of using the term "ecocide" in political discourse. [Extracted from the article]

A growing literature shows that extreme weather can induce pro-environment attitudes. We examine the political effects of a severe flood shortly before the 2021 German federal election. Drawing on about 600,000 survey responses and electoral data, we assess how flooding affected (i) the perceived salience of climate change, (ii) self-reported Green Party support, and (iii) Green Party voting in federal elections. We find that even severe local flooding had little to no effect on these outcomes. Additional evidence supports two mechanisms underlying this finding: nationwide rather than local effects of severe disasters and voter demands for disaster relief rather than climate change prevention. We test the former mechanism using a regression discontinuity design and find that the flood increased nationwide Green Party support, although this effect persists for only two weeks. Our results shed new light on the precise duration and geographic scope of the political effects of natural disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Bioregioning is a new wave of bioregional discourse that appears to be attracting interest among sustainability researchers and practitioners. Through interviews with contemporary leaders and a reflexive research process, we explored bioregioning experiences across seven countries. Our paper outlines the motivations, practices and narratives that we encountered and positions these observations against prior expressions of bioregional thought and broader themes in sustainability research. We found that in bioregioning, the concept of a bioregion remains important and seems to attract people to the discourse in three ways: It inspires visions of the future that encompass more‐than‐human thriving, it creates a conceptual container that enables a strategic narrative for change that connects places to larger scales, and it justifies the importance of everyday people exercising their right to ‘do’ something. The combination of these motivators shows bioregioning's relationship with earlier expressions of bioregional thought: Like early bioregional thinkers, regional scales carry cognitive and strategic appeal, and like critical bioregionalism, power and justice are foregrounded to ensure the process of change is ethical. We suggest that in the shift to bioregioning, the bioregion serves as a boundary device, justifying (for some) a focus on regional scale action which has made bioregional discourse unique, and for others, rationalising participatory or emotional priorities. This lets bioregioning enact a dialogic approach to change and enables practitioners to consider questions of scale in open dialogue with emotive place‐based dynamics, bringing nature re‐connection and social–ecological systems research into consideration and overlap with the practice of bioregioning. We observed parallels between our research process and the central features in bioregioning; both respond to ambitions and calls within sustainability to enact relational values and surface contextualised knowledge while also valuing generalisations and abstraction. Our study, we suggest, provides one example of how research into human–nature relationships in Western sustainability might be pursued in line with these ambitions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.