The Ecology of War and Peace

The connection between ecology and conflict has been the object of extensive study by political scientists and economists. From the contribution of natural resource 'scarcity' to violent unrest and armed conflict; to resource 'abundance' as an incentive for initiating and prolonging armed struggles; to dysfunctional resource management and environmental degradation as obstacles to peacebuilding, this literature has exerted a huge influence upon academic discussions and policy developments. While international law is often invoked as the solution to the socio-environmental challenges faced by conflict-affected countries, its relationship with the ecology of war and peace remains undertheorised. Drawing upon environmental justice perspectives and other theoretical traditions, the book unpacks and problematizes some of the assumptions that underlie the legal field. Through an analysis of the practice of international courts, the UN Security Council, and Truth Commissions, it shows how international law silences and even normalizes forms of structural and slow environmental violence.

Political regimes and foreign investment in poor countries: Insights from most similar African cases

When foreign investors choose to invest in a poor country, do they favor democracies or autocracies? Despite extensive time-series cross-national empirical work on this question, the answer is unclear. To move the debate forward, I use a novel approach based on a most-similar case design. I observe four African countries before, during, and after democratization, and evaluate whether the change in regime type over time affected their ability to attract foreign investment—both relative to their baseline level of investment and in comparison with the investment patterns of four matching countries that did not experience democratization. I also control for the effects of natural resource scarcity and abundance. My difference-in-differences pairwise case analysis indicates the introduction of competitive political institutions is immaterial for foreign investment, whereas the consolidation of these institutions conveys a small investment advantage.

Plastic Flowers: Overlooking Resource Scarcity in Postwar America

This essay historicizes cultural and psychic economies in the postwar United States under the sign of material scarcity. It situates the proliferation of plastic flowers in domestic space within a context of bureaucratic anxieties surrounding natural resource scarcity, and trends toward ‘outdoor living’ that were an offshoot of the ideology of economic growth. Interrogating repeated, if relatively unexamined, invocations of ‘anxious’ suburban subjects in descriptions of postwar society, the essay suggests that plastic flowers shored up a sense of stability and permanence at a time when nuclear annihilation, Cold War paranoia, and population growth combined to render life uncertain and potentially unsustainable. The essay concludes by reflecting on how legacies of that epoch – and the fiction of permanence offered by plastic flowers – endure in contemporary fantasies of limitless progress.

Under pressure

Purpose This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies. Design/methodology/approach This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context. Findings Supply chain strategies and resource efficiencies are integral to the pursuit of competitive advantage for manufacturing organizations that have to contend with natural resource scarcity. Bridging strategy has been identified as the frontrunner in terms of effective strategies to boost competitive advantage. Originality/value The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

A Natural Resource Dependence Perspective of the Firm: How and Why Firms Manage Natural Resource Scarcity

Although natural resource scarcity is a pressing issue for many organizations, it has received little attention in management research. Drawing on resource dependence theory, this article theorizes how organizations manage uncertainty from their dependence on scarce natural resources. For this end, it explains how socio-ecological processes involving anthropogenic impacts on ecosystem services cause this form of uncertainty. It then proposes that organizations develop wide-ranging responses to such uncertainty, depending on their predominant institutional logics, from protecting and restoring ecosystems that provision critical natural resources to further developing those ecosystems for optimal resource yields at the risk of degrading them. The article adds to the limited existing research on the unique challenges of managing natural resource scarcity and extends resource dependence theory by accounting for socio-ecological dynamics that create uncertainty regarding natural resources.

Designing a Waterless Toilet Prototype for Reusable Energy Using a User-Centered Approach and Interviews

User-oriented community engagement can reveal insights into ways of improving a community and solving complex public issues, such as natural resource scarcity. This study describes the early process of co-designing a novel, waterless toilet to respond to the water scarcity problem in the Republic of Korea. It presents how we designed a toilet focusing on three factors—a sanitization function, an ergonomic posture, and clean aesthetics—by conducting focus group interviews as part of a user engagement approach to understand what community users want from a toilet and ways of improving their toilet experiences. The results not only supported the development of an experiential service design project to raise community awareness of water scarcity but also supported scientists and engineers in experimenting with and developing new technologies by collaborating closely with designers.

A critique of Hubbert’s model for peak oil

In 1956, Shell Oil Company geologist M. King Hubbert published a model for the growth and decline over time of the production rates of oil extracted from the land mass of the continental US. Employing an estimate for the amount of ultimately recoverable oil and a logistic curve for the oil production rate, he accurately predicted a peak in US oil production for 1970. His arguments and the success of his prediction have been much celebrated, and the original paper has 1400 publication citations to date. The theory of “peak oil” (and subsequently, of natural resource scarcity in general) has consequently become associated with Hubbert and “Hubbert” curves and models. However, his prediction for the timing of a world peak oil production rate and the subsequent predictions of many others have proven inaccurate. We revisit the Hubbert model for oil extraction and provide an analysis of it and several variants in the language of (time) autonomous differential equations.