scholarly journals Producing landscapes of environmental justice: exploitation of woodlands and wetlands and deep historical geographies of justice on Gotland

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Mels
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Landscape Studies ◽  
Landscape Transformations

Abstract Context The importance of justice is increasingly recognized in environmental policy making. Research on environmental justice offers an important perspective on landscape transformations, both natural and social. Objectives This paper asks how current work on environmental justice might contribute to the development of socio-environmental knowledge of the biophysical landscape. The paper explores the relations between environmental justice thinking and the production of a distinctively capitalist landscape. Methods The paper builds on a review of environmental justice and landscape literature and, for the empirical part, on archival studies and secondary sources. Results The paper shows that there remains a disjunction between landscape studies and the environmental justice literature. It provides a theoretically informed approach of bringing together environmental justice scholarship with the transformations of a contested and distinctively capitalist landscape. By studying changes in woodlands and wetlands on the island of Gotland, Sweden, it uncovers a process of the production of landscape that elicits “deep” historical geographies of environmental justice. The massive exploitation of wetlands and forests shows how an approach encompassing environmental justice in conjunction with forms of resource exploitation and conservation can help grasp changes in the landscape.

Consumption and its Externalities: Where Economy Meets Ecology

2001 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 11-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Princen
Keyword(s):  
At Risk ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Consumer Sovereignty ◽  
Marginal Improvement

If social scientists are going to make a contribution to environmental policy-making that is commensurate with the severity of biophysical trends, they must develop analytic tools that go beyond marginal improvement and a production focus where key actors escape responsibility via distanced commerce and the black box of consumer sovereignty. One means is to construct an ecologically informed “consumption angle” on economic activity. The first approach is to retain the prevailing supply-demand dichotomy and address the externalities of consumption and the role of power in consuming. The second approach is to construe all economic activity as “consuming,” as “using up.” This approach construes material provisioning in the context of hunter/gathering, cultivation, and manufacture and then develops three interpretive layers of excess consumption: background consumption, overconsumption, and misconsumption. An example from timbering illustrates how, by going up and down the decision chain, the consumption angle generates questions about what is consumed and what is put at risk. Explicit assignment of responsibility for excess throughput becomes more likely.

scholarly journals THE USE AND INFLUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION IN ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY MAKING: LESSONS LEARNED FROM NOVA SCOTIA

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Suzuette S. Soomai
Keyword(s):  
Nova Scotia ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Science Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Coastal Policy ◽  
Strategic Approach ◽  
Science Policy Interface

Governmental organisations produce vast quantities of scientific information on the state of the marine and coastal environment which is often intended to guide policy-making to mitigate or reverse the declining trends in the health of the environment. How scientific information is used and how it influences environmental policy and decision making are however not well understood. The apparent disconnect between the knowledge and information produced by scientists and that used by policy makers is attributed to problems at the science-policy interface. Based on a multi-disciplinary literature review, this paper describes how policy makersseek out and use scientific information within the context of policy design in the 21st century. Best practices for increasing information flows across the science-policy interface are drawn from a study of the awareness, use, and influence of The 2009 State of the Nova Scotia Coast Report in coastal policy making in Nova Scotia.Strategic or rational approaches to policy making can increase the two-way flow of information across the science-policy interface as it facilitates collaboration among multiple actors in information generation, transmis-sion, and use. The production, use, and influence of The 2009 State ofNova Scotia's Coast Report in coastal policy making in Nova Scotia demonstrates the strategic approach to policy making whereby coastal policy is being developed through (i) intergovernmental partnerships, (ii) the use of best available information, (iii) linkages between the policy process and policy output, and (iv) public participation.

scholarly journals Political control and policy-making uncertainty in executive orders: the implementation of environmental justice policy

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 329-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Provost ◽  
Brian J. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Political Control ◽  
Executive Order ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Executive Orders ◽  
Fire Alarm ◽  
Bureaucratic Responsiveness ◽  
The Impact

AbstractEnvironmental justice (EJ) has represented an important equity challenge in policymaking for decades. President Clinton’s executive order (EO) 12898 in 1994 represented a significant federal action, requiring agencies to account for EJ issues in new rulemakings. We examine the impact of EO 12898 within the larger question of how EO are implemented in complex policymaking. We argue that presidential preferences will affect bureaucratic responsiveness and fire alarm oversight. However, EJ policy complexity produces uncertainty leading to bureaucratic risk aversion, constraining presidential efforts to steer policy. We utilise an original data set of nearly 2,000 final federal agency rules citing EO 12898 and find significant variation in its utilisation across administrations. Uncertainty over the nature of the order has an important influence on bureaucratic responsiveness. Our findings are instructive for the twin influences of political control and policy-making uncertainty and raise useful questions for future EJ and policy implementation research.

A Hint of Things to Come …

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-36
Author(s):  
Charles R. Cobb
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Anthropology ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Landscape Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
Landscape Transformations ◽  
Point Of Departure

This chapter provides an overview of landscape studies in archaeology, particularly as practiced in the southeastern United States. There is an extended discussion justifying historical anthropology as an important point of departure for this study, in particular because of its usefulness for exploring processes of colonialism. The chapter provides summaries of the major Native American groups and European powers that appear in the remainder of the volume. Generally speaking, the three major European players, or the Spanish, English, and French had different goals and methods of colonization. These methods cumulatively spurred a highly ramified history of landscape transformations for Native Americans. The chapter’s approach resonates well with post-colonial approaches that attempt to decolonize the past by removing Europeans as the primary lens by which we view the actions of Indigenous peoples. Working under rubrics such as “Native-lived colonialism” and “decolonizing the past,” archaeologists increasingly are seeking to integrate European texts, the archaeological record, oral histories, and the perspectives of Native peoples to try and achieve a plural perspective on past lifeways.

Integrating Ecosystem Management and Environmental Media for Public Policy on Public Health and Safety

2018 ◽  
pp. 321-338
Author(s):  
Augustine Nduka Eneanya
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Health And Safety ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Scientific Uncertainty ◽  
Public Health And Safety

Over the past three decades, the relationship between ecology and public policy has changed because of the increasing role of scientific uncertainty in environmental policy making. While earlier policy questions might have been solved simply by looking at the scientific technicalities of the issues, the increased role of scientific uncertainty in environmental policy making requires that we re-examine the methods used in decision-making. Previously, policymakers use scientific data to support their decision-making disciplinary boundaries are less useful because uncertain environmental policy problems span the natural sciences, engineering, economics, politics, and ethics. The chapter serves as a bridge integrating environmental ecosystem, media, and justice into policy for public health and safety. The chapter attempts to demonstrate the linkage between the environmental policy from a holistic perspective with the interaction of air, water, land, and human on public health and safety.

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