Civil society and the future of environmental governance in Asia

Author(s):  
Lyuba Zarsky ◽  
Simon S.C. Tay
2017 ◽  
pp. 128-154
Author(s):  
Lyuba Zarsky ◽  
Simon S.C. Tay

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 318-338
Author(s):  
Anthony Edwards

Abstract This article recovers a dissonant voice from the nineteenth-century nahḍa. Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881) was a fervent Protestant and staunch Anglophile. Unlike his Ottoman Syrian contemporaries, who argued for religious diversity and the formation of a civil society based on a shared Arab past, he believed that the only geopolitical Syria viable in the future was one grounded in Protestant virtues and English values. This article examines Ameuney’s complicated journey to become a Protestant Englishman and his inescapable characterization as a son of Syria. It charts his personal life and intellectual career and explores how he interpreted the religious, cultural, political, and linguistic landscape of his birthplace to British audiences. As an English-speaking Ottoman Syrian intellectual residing permanently in London, the case of Antonius Ameuney illustrates England to have been a constitutive site of the nahḍa and underscores the role played by the British public in shaping nahḍa discourses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo Martín

Decisions on the future conformation of the planet and its biosphere will soon have to be made. About 30% of the globe under different categories will be declared a protected area by 2030. Such determination on international level, perhaps unique in its kind due to its territorial scope, will lead to the re-conformation and resignification of enormous spaces. For a century and a half, protected areas have been changing their purposes; it is now necessary to review their governance and the effectiveness of their management, which should not replicate that of unprotected territories. High social and environmental expectations will fall on marginal public institutions within their governments. Many of them dream that these territories will provide alternative models to those offered by traditional governance, projecting non-environmental political utopias and adding complexity. The objective of this work is to evaluate the challenge and lay out criteria to confront it. To this end, demands and feasibility in the case of Argentina are analyzed through two scenarios, estimating the necessary resources and pointing out possible criteria. It is concluded that many priorities must be reformulated in the country and the world to meet a new territoriality since the environmental governance is a good alternative, which is as much in crisis as the traditional one.


2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 984-1005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matti Minkkinen

This article investigates how futures of privacy protection are made in Europe. The public consultation phase of the European Union’s data protection reform is analysed as a case of making the future by using the future, that is, influencing institutional change through anticipatory storylines. A qualitative analysis of consultation responses is conducted, and two discourse coalitions are identified. The industry coalition promotes market liberalisation to allow the digital future to emerge. The civil society coalition, in turn, argues for rescuing privacy with strict rules. The article suggests that plausibility in relation to the discursive and extra-discursive environment is crucial for the success of storylines. The second storyline was relatively successful because it was more plausible in light of the trend of legalism and the predominant future-oriented narrative of privacy in danger. The ‘anticipatory institutionalism’ approach opens novel perspectives concerning actors’ future-oriented projects in relation to historical processes.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 132-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur P. J. Mol

The growing attention to transparency is not an accidental and fashionable wave, soon to be replaced by another timely topic in environmental governance. Transparency is here to stay and to further develop in environmental politics, as it piggy-backs on a number of wider social developments. In assessing the achievements of transparency to date, this article concludes that it has on balance been positive for democracy. But this overall positive past assessment does not automatically extend into the future, as new challenges (and thus new research agendas) lie ahead. The growing importance attached to transparency in environmental politics ensures that it becomes a central object of power struggles, with uncertain outcomes in terms of democracy as well as environmental effects. Markets and states seek to capture transparency arrangements for their own goals, which may not necessarily be in line with assumed normative linkages between transparency, democracy and participation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Stripple ◽  
Alexandra Nikoleris ◽  
Roger Hildingsson

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative “Carbon Ruins—An Exhibition of the Fossil Era” (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently.


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