Download or read book Democratic Sustainability in a New Era of Localism written by John Stanton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change and development are going on all around us. On both an international platform, as well as at the local governmental and community level, governments, decision and policy makers constantly strive to improve the world in which we live, seeking to make it better and to improve quality of life. This book focuses on such development in the context of localism in the UK. It strips the principle of local sustainability down to its constituent parts and considers the extent to which it can be said to be central to local life. As part of this, it presents the case for the importance of accountability and citizen participation in achieving objectives aligned with sustainability, and illustrates the relationships that these principles share. On this foundation, it evaluates local government in the UK, as well as examples of community-led regeneration initiatives and bodies, and seeks to determine both the nature of their pursuit of sustainability and the extent to which accountability and citizen participation play a part in that pursuit. It shows that local sustainability is enhanced by accountability and citizen participation; those principles ensuring that local people can be central to the process. Whilst its evaluations of local democratic systems in the UK reveal certain issues as regards the extent to which this is reflected in practice, it at least demonstrates an enthusiasm and awareness of the important role that accountability and citizen participation can play in the process of local sustainability. The book is aimed at legal academics, with relevance also to students in law, environmental politics and sustainable development, as well as those working in government policy and political practice.

Download or read book Democratic Sustainability in a New Era of Localism written by John Stanton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Change and development are going on all around us. On both an international platform, as well as at the local governmental and community level, governments, decision and policy makers constantly strive to improve the world in which we live, seeking to make it better and to improve quality of life. This book focuses on such development in the context of localism in the UK. It strips the principle of local sustainability down to its constituent parts and considers the extent to which it can be said to be central to local life. As part of this, it presents the case for the importance of accountability and citizen participation in achieving objectives aligned with sustainability, and illustrates the relationships that these principles share. On this foundation, it evaluates local government in the UK, as well as examples of community-led regeneration initiatives and bodies, and seeks to determine both the nature of their pursuit of sustainability and the extent to which accountability and citizen participation play a part in that pursuit. It shows that local sustainability is enhanced by accountability and citizen participation; those principles ensuring that local people can be central to the process. Whilst its evaluations of local democratic systems in the UK reveal certain issues as regards the extent to which this is reflected in practice, it at least demonstrates an enthusiasm and awareness of the important role that accountability and citizen participation can play in the process of local sustainability. The book is aimed at legal academics, with relevance also to students in law, environmental politics and sustainable development, as well as those working in government policy and political practice.

Download or read book Law Localism and the Constitution written by John Stanton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Local government affects us all. Wherever we live, in towns, cities, villages, or the smallest of communities, there are locally elected councils tasked with representing people’s interests in the running of the local area. This involves, inter alia, providing public services, maintaining local spaces, and acting as a level of democratic governance within the broader constitutional and executive structure of the state. To fulfil these responsibilities, though, local government must be democratically legitimate; it must have at its disposal reasonable means and resources to function; and it must enjoy a healthy and balanced relationship with centralised government. This book explores and analyses the extent to which local government in the different parts of the United Kingdom is able to function effectively and democratically. It draws from local councillors’ views in analysing the state of local government under the current constitutional and governmental arrangements, discussing issues such as councils’ relationships with central government; citizen engagement; finance and public services; and the impact of recent reforms. It contrasts and compares the different approaches adopted in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, also setting out and discussing possible reforms of local government across the United Kingdom. While the focus is on the United Kingdom, the work includes a comparison with other relevant jurisdictions.

Download or read book The New Localism written by Bruce Katz and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Localism provides a roadmap for change that starts in the communities where most people live and work. In their new book, The New Localism, urban experts Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak reveal where the real power to create change lies and how it can be used to address our most serious social, economic, and environmental challenges. Power is shifting in the world: downward from national governments and states to cities and metropolitan communities; horizontally from the public sector to networks of public, private and civic actors; and globally along circuits of capital, trade, and innovation. This new locus of power—this new localism—is emerging by necessity to solve the grand challenges characteristic of modern societies: economic competitiveness, social inclusion and opportunity; a renewed public life; the challenge of diversity; and the imperative of environmental sustainability. Where rising populism on the right and the left exploits the grievances of those left behind in the global economy, new localism has developed as a mechanism to address them head on. New localism is not a replacement for the vital roles federal governments play; it is the ideal complement to an effective federal government, and, currently, an urgently needed remedy for national dysfunction. In The New Localism, Katz and Nowak tell the stories of the cities that are on the vanguard of problem solving. Pittsburgh is catalyzing inclusive growth by inventing and deploying new industries and technologies. Indianapolis is governing its city and metropolis through a network of public, private and civic leaders. Copenhagen is using publicly owned assets like their waterfront to spur large scale redevelopment and finance infrastructure from land sales. Out of these stories emerge new norms of growth, governance, and finance and a path toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and inclusive society. Katz and Nowak imagine a world in which urban institutions finance the future through smart investments in innovation, infrastructure and children and urban intermediaries take solutions created in one city and adapt and tailor them to other cities with speed and precision. As Katz and Nowak show us in The New Localism, “Power now belongs to the problem solvers.”

Download or read book The Future of Consumer Society written by Maurie J. Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurie J. Cohen shows how consumer society is changing due to demographic ageing, rising income inequality, political paralysis, resource scarcity, and steady jobs being replaced by freelancing. He examines how people are striving to find new ways to ensure livelihoods and the role that worker-consumer cooperatives could play.

Download or read book Cities and Sustainability written by Daniel Hoornweg and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-08-25 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cities are the most likely actors to design and bring about lasting sustainability. An agreement among the world’s larger cities is possible, and likely a necessary but insufficient condition to achieve sustainable development. Cities and Sustainability explores the ways in which cities are both the biggest threat to sustainability, and the most powerful tool to get us to sustainable development. Employing an innovative methodology to a complex issue, the book proposes new metrics and approaches that assume cities as fundamental in the search for sustainability. Providing population projections for the world’s larger cities and a hierarchy of sustainable cities, the author develops two new tools: (i) a cities approach to physical and socio-economic boundaries, and (ii) sustainability costs curves. These tools are designed to be implemented in a multi-stakeholder, integrated partnership that truly maximizes the benefits of cities in the quest for sustainability. Applying the tools outlined in the book to case studies from Dakar, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Toronto, this volume will be of great relevance to students, scholars and practitioners with an interest in urban and city management, climate change, and environment and sustainability more broadly.

Download or read book Sustainable Development in the European Union written by Matthew Humphreys and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book undertakes a critical appraisal of the concept of sustainable development in the European Union. In addition to existing issues of sustainability, it examines the development of a European "general principle" of sustainable development. This original, critical approach examines legal, political, and economic implications of the emergence of the principle and places the impact of such in local, national, intranational, and international contexts. While essentially focusing on the development of the principle, the discussion also includes a normative assessment of current policy and practice, and appraises European efforts in the light of international goals.

Download or read book Reconsidering Localism written by Simin Davoudi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-09 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Localism" has been deployed in recent debates over planning law as an anodyne, grassroots way to shape communities into sustainable, human-scale neighborhoods. But "local" is a moving category, with contradictory, nuanced dimensions. Reconsidering Localism brings together new scholarship from leading academics in Europe and North America to develop a theoretically-grounded critique and definition of the new localism, and how it has come to shape urban governance and urban planning. Moving beyond the UK, this book examines localism and similar shifts in planning policy throughout Europe, and features essays on localism and place-making, sustainability, social cohesion, and citizen participation in community institutions. It explores how debates over localism and citizen control play out at the neighborhood, institutional and city level, and has come to effect the urban landscape throughout Europe. Reconsidering Localism is a current, vital addition to planning scholarship.

Download or read book Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes written by Dena Fam and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Transdisciplinarity’ is a form of research and practice that synthesises knowledge from a range of academic disciplines and from the community. There is now global interest and a significant body of work on transdisciplinarity and its potential to address the apparently intractable problems of society. This creates the opportunity for a specific focus on its practical application to sustainability issues. Transdisciplinary Research and Practice for Sustainability Outcomes examines the role of transdisciplinarity in the transformations needed for a sustainable world. After an historical overview of transdisciplinarity, Part I focuses on tools and frameworks to achieve sustainability outcomes in practice and Part II consolidates work by a number of scholars on supporting transdisciplinary researchers and practitioners. Part III is a series of case studies including several international examples that demonstrate the challenges and rewards of transdisciplinary work. The concluding chapter proposes a future research pathway for understanding the human factors that underpin successful transdisciplinary research. As Emeritus Professor Valerie Brown AO notes in her Preface, this book moves transdisciplinary inquiry into the academic and social mainstream. It will be of great interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of sustainability, qualitative research methods, environmental impact assessment and development studies.

Download or read book Sustainable Communities and Green Lifestyles written by Tendai Chitewere and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable communities raise questions about the compatibility of capitalism and environmentalism and how we can green our way of life in a capitalist economy that values short-term production and consumption over long-term conservation and simple living. If capitalism and its drive towards consumption has produced social and environmental degradation, is it the best medium to identify solutions? Sustainable Communities and Green Lifestyles examines one ecovillage as it attempts to create a sense of community while reducing its impact on the natural environment. Through extensive participant observation, the book demonstrates how ecovillages are immersed within a larger discourse of class, race, and lifestyle choices, highlighting the inseparability of environmental sustainability and social justice. Sustainable communities are confronted by the contradictions of green consumption and must address social inequality or risk focusing inward on personal green consumerism, creating mere green havens for the few who can afford to live in them. This book, cautious of redirecting environmentalist efforts away from structural solutions and onto personal environmentalism, offers a critical perspective on the challenges of an emerging green lifestyle. This book offers a critical perspective on the direction of US environmentalism and contributes to debates in environmental studies, anthropology, and urban planning.

Download or read book Human Rights and Sustainability written by Gerhard Bos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of human rights suggests that individuals should be empowered in their natural, political, political, social and economic vulnerabilities. States within the international arena hold each other responsible for doing just that and support or interfere where necessary. States are to protect these essential human vulnerabilities, even when this is not a matter of self-interest. This function of human rights is recognized in contexts of intervention, genocide, humanitarian aid and development. This book develops the idea of environmental obligations as long-term responsibilities in the context of human rights. It proposes that human rights require recognition that, in the face of unsustainable conduct, future human persons are exposed and vulnerable. It explores the obstacles for long-term responsibilities that human rights law provides at the level of international and national law and challenges the question of whether lifestyle restrictions are enforceable in view of liberties and levels of wellbeing typically seen as protected by human rights. The book will be of interest to postgraduates studying Human Rights, Sustainability, Law and Philosophy.

Download or read book Sustainability and the Art of Long Term Thinking written by Bernd Klauer and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dealing with time is intimately linked to sustainability, because sustainability, at its core, involves long-term ethical claims. To live up to them, decision and policy-making has to consider long-term development of society, economy, and nature. However, dealing with time and such long-term development is a notoriously difficult subject, both in science and, in particular, in practical decision and policy making. Rooted in philosophical and scientific reasoning, this book explores how the concept of time can be incorporated into effective practical action. The book describes a system and uses case studies to help sustainability practitioners and researchers consider the long-term consequences of our actions in a methodical way. The system integrates scientific and practical knowledge about time and temporal developments to help break down the sometimes overwhelming complexity of sustainability issues. Combining theoretical conceptual thinking and practical applications, this book will be of great interest to students and researchers of sustainability science, environmental sciences, sustainable development, environmental economics, political sciences and practical philosophy.

Download or read book The Politics of Sustainability written by Dieter Birnbacher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Responsibility for future generations is easily postulated in the abstract but it is much more difficult to set it to work in the concrete. It requires some changes in individual and institutional attitudes that are in opposition to what has been called the "systems variables" of industrial society: individual freedom, consumerism, and equality. The Politics of Sustainability from Philosophical Perspectives seeks to examine the motivational and institutional obstacles standing in the way of a consistent politics of sustainability and to look for strategies to overcome them. It argues that though there have been significant changes in individual and especially collective attitudes to growth, intergenerational solidarity and nature preservation, it is far from certain whether these will be sufficient to encourage politicians into giving sustainable policies priority over other legitimate concerns. Having a philosophical approach as its main focus, the volume is at the same time interdisciplinary in combining political, psychological, ecological and economic analyses. This book will be a contribution to the joint effort to meet the theoretical and practical challenges posed by climate change and other impending global perils and will be of interest to students of environmental studies, applied ethics and environmental psychology.

Download or read book Social Practices Intervention and Sustainability written by Yolande Strengers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of dramatic environmental change, social change is desperately needed to curb burgeoning consumption. Many calls to action have focused on individual behaviour or technological innovation, with relative silence from the social sciences on other modes and methods of intervening in social life. This book shows how we can go beyond behaviour change in the pursuit of sustainability. Inspired by the ‘practice turn’ in consumption studies, this interdisciplinary book looks through the lens of social practice theory to explore important and timely questions about how to intervene in social life. It discusses a range of applied sustainability topics including energy consumption, housing provision, water demand, transport, climate change, curbside recycling and smart grids, seeking to redefine what intervention is, how it happens, and who or what can intervene to address the growing list of environmental calamities facing contemporary societies. These issues are explored through a range of specific case studies from Australia, the UK and the US, providing theoretical insights that are of international relevance. The book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of sociology, consumption studies, environmental studies, geography, and science and technology studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners seeking to intervene in social life for sustainability.

Download or read book Rethinking the Green State written by Karin Bäckstrand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book is one of the first to conduct a systematic comprehensive analysis of the ideals and practices of the evolving green state. It draws on elements of political theory, feminist theory, post-structuralism, governance and institutional theory to conceptualise the green state and advances thinking on how to understand its emergence in the context of climate and sustainability transitions. Focusing on the state as an actor in environmental, climate and sustainability politics, the book explores different principles guiding the emergence of the green state and examines the performance of states and institutional responses to the sustainable and climate transitions in the European and Nordic context in particular. The book’s unique focus on the Nordic countries underlines the important to learn from Nordics, which are perceived to be in the forefront of climate and sustainability governance as well as historically strong welfare states. With chapter contributions from leading international scholars in political science, sociology, economics, energy and environmental systems and climate policy studies, this book will be of great value to postgraduate students and researchers working on sustainability transitions, environmental politics and governance, and those with an area studies focus on the Nordic countries.

Download or read book Transdisciplinary Sustainability Studies written by Katri Huutoniemi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arising out of human-environment interaction, sustainability problems resist disciplinary categories and simple solutions. This book offers a fresh approach to practical and methodological concerns in transdisciplinary environmental and sustainability studies. It illustrates methodological means by which researchers, professionals, and decision-makers can address complex environmental issues. While scientific reasoning is mostly guided by disciplinary traditions, transdisciplinary research rests on other cognitive strategies. As it does not have a ready-made stance toward problems, figuring out what the puzzle is and what the answer might look like are crucial aspects of transdisciplinary inquiry. Through examples from environment and sustainability studies, the volume discusses heuristic schemes that can give structure to this exploration. By focusing on heuristics, rather than on methods, concepts, or general guidelines, the book argues that a problem-centered approach often resists the rigor of methodology. Learning from experience provides valuable “rules of thumb”, checklists, and other cognitive schemes for making ill-defined problems more tangible. Written by an international team of authors, the chapters draw examples from dealing with issues in environmental protection, transport and climate policy, ecosystem services and disservices, environmental beliefs and attitudes, and more. Together with more theoretically oriented chapters, they show that the intellectual processes needed to tackle complex sustainability problems are as much about heuristic problem solving as they are about methodical work.

Download or read book Energy and Transport in Green Transition written by Atle Midttun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book breaks new ground in the studies of green transition. It frames the ongoing transformation in terms of a "battle of modernities" with the emerging vision of ecomodernity as the final destination. It also offers a systematic exploration of the potential for extensive transformation of carbon-intensive sectors – with a focus on energy and transport – towards a low or post-carbon economy. The book does so in a comparative perspective, by pointing to a diversity of techno-economic and institutional solutions in the mature Western economies, and in the rapidly growing East and developing South. The contributors highlight a broad spectrum of available alternatives as well as illuminate conflicting interests involved. They also demonstrate how solutions to the climate challenge require parallel technological and governance innovation. The book advocates a new, overarching vision and agenda of ecomodernity – based on a synergistic paradigm-shift in industry, politics and culture – to trigger and sustain the ecological innovation necessary to tip development in a green direction. This vision cannot be monolithic; rather, it should reflect the diverse interests and conditions of the global population. This book is aimed at researchers and postgraduate students of energy, transport, environmental and climate policies, as well as development, environment, innovation and sustainability.