The coalitional politics of the European Union’s environmental forest policy: Biodiversity conservation, timber legality, and climate protection

European forest policymaking is shaped by progressing European integration, yet with notable ideological divisions and diverging interests among countries. This paper focuses on the coalitional politics of key environmental forest issues: biodiversity conservation, timber legality, and climate protection policy. Combining the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Shifting Coalition Theory, and informed by more than 186 key informant interviews and 73 policy documents spanning a 20-year timeframe, we examine the evolution of coalitional forest politics in Europe. We find that the basic line-up has remained stable: an environmental coalition supporting EU environmental forest policy integration and a forest sector coalition mostly opposing it. Still, strategic alliances across these coalitions have occurred for specific policy issues which have resulted in a gradual establishment of an EU environmental forest policy. We conclude with discussion of our findings and provide suggestions for further research.

Unconventional Combat

Unconventional Combat illuminates the generational transformation of the U.S. veterans’ peace movement, from one grounded mostly in the experiences of White men of the Vietnam War era, to one increasingly driven by a younger and much more diverse cohort of “post-9/11” veterans. Participant observation with two organizations (Veterans For Peace and About Face) and interviews with older men veterans form the backdrop for the book’s main focus, life-history interviews with six younger veterans—all people of color, three of them women, one a Native Two-Spirit person, one a genderqueer non-binary person. The book traces these veterans’ experiences of sexual and gender harassment, sexual assault, racist and homophobic abuse during their military service (some of it in combat zones), centering on their “situated knowledge” of intersecting oppressions. As veterans, this knowledge shapes their intersectional praxis, which promises to transform the veterans’ peace movement, and provides a connective language through which veterans’ anti-militarism work links with movements for racial justice, stopping gender and sexual violence, addressing climate change, and building anti-colonial coalitions. This promise is sometimes thwarted by older veterans, whose commitment to “diversity” often falls short of creating organizational space for full inclusion of previously marginalized “others.” Intersectionality is the analytic coin of today’s emergent movement field, and the connective tissue of a growing coalitional politics. The veterans that are the focus of this book are part of this larger shift in the social movement ecology, and they contribute a critical understanding of war and militarism to progressive coalitions.

Sanctuary Says

In 2018, the New School Working Group on Expanded Sanctuary collaboratively organized a series of workshops in New York to reflect on the question of sanctuary as a conceptual and practical starting point for cross-coalitional politics, including its tensions and risks. This short piece is an attempt to bring together the sentiments expressed in those workshops by activists, organizers, students and academics focusing on anti-racist, pro-migrant, and pro-Indigenous struggles, in a form that engages sanctuary as an ongoing question.

Populism, “Anti” Ideologies, and Feminist Coalitions

By understanding populism as an “anti-” politics we can see two strands of populism: the anti-democratic strand which marginalizes certain groups of people and the anti-structural injustice strand coming from marginalized people. The potential of this anti-structural injustice activism encourages activists to expand their coalitional politics and government and philanthropic donors to see the import of funding and otherwise supporting work against structural injustice that explicitly takes on patriarchy and racism, among the full gamut of ideologies based on hierarchy and injustice.

The Forest Sector in the 2030 EU Climate Policy Framework: Looking back to Assess Its Future

From 2021 onwards, forests and forestry will for the first time contribute to the European Union’s climate action targets. The new Land Use, Land Use Change & Forestry (lulucf) Regulation commits Member States to achieve carbon neutrality on the basis of an EU-wide system. The system accounts for carbon sequestered and emitted from forests and other land uses like crop- and wetland. What looks like a significant step in the Union’s climate policy framework, however, leaves the large potential of Europe’s forest sector for climate mitigation untapped. The present article draws this conclusion from a comprehensive analysis of 67 documents related to decision-making on the lulucf Regulation. It reveals coalitional politics and the salience of the Commission’s behavior as key to explain the Regulation’s limited scope and concludes with assessing the future role of forests in the Union’s climate policy framework.

Local Elections and Local Politics in Indonesia: Emerging Trends

This article analyses local elections held in the post-Suharto era in Indonesia with a special reference to pilkada (pemilihan kepala daerah langsung [direct elections of local leaders]) between 2005 and 2008. Using the state-society perspective, it argues that local elections have seen the rise of new political dynamics and rapid growth of electoral activity in regions. Pilkada has brought about the emergence of coalitional politics, political ideologies or streams (aliran), the rise of ‘little kings’ (raja kecil), an increasing number of businesspeople entering local politics, the use of gangsters/goons (preman) in local elections, a boom in political consultancy, and the increase of the novote camp. There are grounds for optimism regxarding the intensity of the interaction between the local state and society in the regions. The people in the regions have now had the opportunities to vote for their leaders directly, something which was impossible in the past. There is no doubt that the electoral competition for candidates is going to be very important because the availability of good potential local leaders varies between the regions. Political parties themselves have to improve their performance and build a proper recruitment process so that they can find good candidates who can attract voters.

Disability, Debility, and Caring Queerly

As one approach to the left of queer, the authors explore the juncture between queer studies and disability studies. Queer disability studies offers ways of conceptualizing the world as relationally complex, thus contributing additional pathways for the long project of rethinking justice in light of the critique of the liberal individual who is the bearer of rights. Debility, disability, care, labor, and value form a complex assemblage that shapes policies, bodies, and personhood. Putting disability and debility in relation to each other creates perverse sets of social relations that both constrain and produce queer potentialities, connecting affect and action in unexpected ways. A queer materialist focus on nonnormative labor opens the possibility of revaluing domestic work and caring labor generally as a first step to shifting relations between disabled people and those who do the work of care. Building social solidarity from the ground up requires both a queer theory of value and a geopolitical model of disability as vital components for queer materialism. Through a combination of embodied narrative and activist examples, the analysis frames the complexities of care and possibilities for a similarly complex coalitional politics.

The Politics of Change. Coalitional politics and labour market reforms during the sovereign debt crisis in Portugal

This article describes and explains labour market reforms in Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2011 to 2014. Policy outputs were not homogenous, but differentiated between a first phase where recalibration co-existed alongside hard liberalising measures and a second phase, from late 2012, where recalibration was dropped and liberalisation further deregulated employment protection and security and eroded collective bargaining. This variation is explained by the changing coalitional politics and blame allocation underpinning policymaking under conditionality. Initial reforms resulted from a broad informal political coalition spanning the governing centre-right parties, the main opposition party, a trade union and employer confederations; its breakdown in late 2012 led to the executive’s increasing centralisation, the shut down of social concertation, and more radical policy outputs. The article shows that cooperation between government and opposition and government and social partners is possible even under external conditionality, how coalition politics affects the nature and direction of reforms, and highlights how political dynamics of blame allocation drive the process of coalition building and breakdown.

A decolonial pedagogy for teaching intersectionality

This article discusses a “pragmatic toolkit” for decolonizing a course by intersectionality combining key notions in literature in decolonial education with four components extracted from the works of Orlando Fals-Borda and Paulo Freire by Joao Mota Neto (2018). As a kind of toolkit for decolonial change, the article first combines the role of being a subversive scholar to address “injuries of coloniality” that places the discipline as part of a landscape of power in the context of a gender studies BA-course. Repairing these injuries of coloniality demanded curriculum changes, to restore the disobedient epistemology inherent in the concept of intersectionality. Second, in so doing, the pragmatic toolkit provided a participatory frame for exchanges of knowledge in a classroom composed of multiple identities, which then aimed to promote diversity and difference. Third, this orientation made a frame suitable for searching for other epistemic coordinates, exploring for example politics of emotion to erase barriers toward potential others, and including literature on coalitional politics. And fourth, revisiting the “telluric origins” of feminist research helped the students reinvent power through writing critical reflections that awaked their “interest in social action” to contest racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, transphobia, and speciesism.