Download or read book Environmental Democracy Facing Uncertainty written by Cécilia Claeys and published by P.I.E-Peter Lang S.A., Editions Scientifiques Internationales. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collective work provides a reflexive reading of environmental democracy as a new method of governance of the contemporary ecological issues that declining biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development present. The authors examine the links between the environment and democracy by questioning the status of actors, the manner of their involvement, the various ways of mobilising knowledge and the mechanisms of dialogue and decision-making based on study cases observed in different national contexts (Italy, France, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Canada and Brazil). This international approach sheds light on the means of appropriation of environmental democracy on a local level and its ability to promote universal characteristics or to standardise the connection to the environment and politics. The originality of this work comes, among other things, from its transversality, associating texts with differing theoretical outlooks and methodology in an innovative way. Through this perspective on-going processes of redefining environmental problems are revealed via the prisms of risks and uncertainty, thus assigning them a new role in aiding decision-making in a sociology that is in turn critical and committed.
Download or read book Teaching Democracy in an Age of Uncertainty written by Gilbert Burgh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is the first monograph on philosophy for children to focus on education in a democracy.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 2018 written by Freedom House and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 1040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The methodology of this survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories.
Download or read book Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is one of several federal agencies responsible for protecting Americans against significant risks to human health and the environment. As part of that mission, EPA estimates the nature, magnitude, and likelihood of risks to human health and the environment; identifies the potential regulatory actions that will mitigate those risks and protect public health1 and the environment; and uses that information to decide on appropriate regulatory action. Uncertainties, both qualitative and quantitative, in the data and analyses on which these decisions are based enter into the process at each step. As a result, the informed identification and use of the uncertainties inherent in the process is an essential feature of environmental decision making. EPA requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convene a committee to provide guidance to its decision makers and their partners in states and localities on approaches to managing risk in different contexts when uncertainty is present. It also sought guidance on how information on uncertainty should be presented to help risk managers make sound decisions and to increase transparency in its communications with the public about those decisions. Given that its charge is not limited to human health risk assessment and includes broad questions about managing risks and decision making, in this report the committee examines the analysis of uncertainty in those other areas in addition to human health risks. Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty explains the statement of task and summarizes the findings of the committee.
Download or read book Global Trends 2040 written by National Intelligence Council and published by Cosimo Reports. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.
Download or read book The Politics of Uncertainty written by Ian Scoones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book’s chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural disasters, migration, crime and security and spirituality and religion. The book argues that uncertainties must be understood as complex constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice. Examining in particular how uncertainties are experienced in contexts of marginalisation and precarity, this book shows how sustainability and development are not just technical issues, but depend deeply on political values and choices. What burgeoning uncertainties require lies less in escalating efforts at control, but more in a new – more collective, mutualistic and convivial – politics of responsibility and care. If hopes of much-needed progressive transformation are to be realised, then currently blinkered understandings of uncertainty need to be met with renewed democratic struggle. Written in an accessible style and illustrated by multiple case studies from across the world, this book will appeal to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in fields ranging from economics to law to science studies to sociology to anthropology and geography, as well as professionals working in risk management, disaster risk reduction, emergencies and wider public policy fields.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social Ecological Systems written by Reinette Biggs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods for Social-Ecological Systems provides a synthetic guide to the range of methods that can be employed in social-ecological systems (SES) research. The book is primarily targeted at graduate students, lecturers and researchers working on SES, and has been written in a style that is accessible to readers entering the field from a variety of different disciplinary backgrounds. Each chapter discusses the types of SES questions to which the particular methods are suited and the potential resources and skills required for their implementation, and provides practical examples of the application of the methods. In addition, the book contains a conceptual and practical introduction to SES research, a discussion of key gaps and frontiers in SES research methods, and a glossary of key terms in SES research. Contributions from 97 different authors, situated at SES research hubs in 16 countries around the world, including South Africa, Sweden, Germany and Australia, bring a wealth of expertise and experience to this book. The first book to provide a guide and introduction specifically focused on methods for studying SES, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainability science, environmental management, global environmental change studies and environmental governance. The book will also be of interest to upper-level undergraduates and professionals working at the science–policy interface in the environmental arena.
Download or read book Environmental Democracy written by Michael Mason and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 2012 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a wide range of case studies, Mason reveals just how sensitive we all must be to styles of power, vulnerability and resilience in any democratic transition to sustainability. This is a fine book.' Timothy O'Riordan, Professor of Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, and Associate Director, Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment. Civic self-determination and ecological sustainability are widely accepted as two of the most important public goals. This book explains how they can be combined. Using vivid and telling case studies from around the world, it shows how liberal rights can include both ecological and social conditions for collective decision-making - environmentalist goals and social justice can be achieved together. Integrating theory and original case studies, the book makes a very significant contribution to the fundamentals of how environmental democracy can be advanced at all levels. Cogently argued and engaged, Environmental Democracy provides a superb teaching text and a source of ideas and persuasive arguments for the politically and environmentally engaged. It will be essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in politics, policy studies, environmental studies, geography and social science.
Download or read book Valuing Ecosystem Services written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-05-14 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nutrient recycling, habitat for plants and animals, flood control, and water supply are among the many beneficial services provided by aquatic ecosystems. In making decisions about human activities, such as draining a wetland for a housing development, it is essential to consider both the value of the development and the value of the ecosystem services that could be lost. Despite a growing recognition of the importance of ecosystem services, their value is often overlooked in environmental decision-making. This report identifies methods for assigning economic value to ecosystem servicesâ€"even intangible onesâ€"and calls for greater collaboration between ecologists and economists in such efforts.
Download or read book Biosphere Reserves and Sustainable Development Goals 1 written by Angela Barthes and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1971, UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme has embraced a number of principles that link the political, scientific and academic spheres. Biosphere Reserves and Sustainable Development Goals 1 presents these areas as privileged spaces for experimenting with operating methods specific to cross-cutting objectives and issues. These areas encourage the development of interdisciplinary research, supported by a worldwide network to disseminate experience, approaches and knowhow. The various global and local political scales are linked here, with different consequences for the reconfiguration of local political arenas, for specific modes of development linked to a renewed relationship with knowledge, powers and institutions, and for renewed relationships between the worlds of science, education and territorial governance.
Download or read book Ecology Capitalism and the New Agricultural Economy written by Gilles Allaire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With increasing pressure on resources, the looming spectre of climate change and growing anxiety among eaters, ecology and food are at the heart of the political debates surrounding agriculture and diet. This unique contribution unravels agri-environmental issues at different spatial levels, from local to global, documenting the major shifts in agriculture from a long-term perspective. The book begins by exploring the changes in the industrialisation and socialisation of agriculture over time, through the lens of institutional economics including The French Regulation School and Conventions Theory. Building on Polanyi’s ‘Great Transformation’, the chapters in this volume analyse long-term and contemporary changes in agriculture and food systems that have occurred throughout the last few centuries. Key chapters focus on the historical changes in provisioning and the social relations of production, consumption, and regulation of food in different socio-political contexts. The future of agriculture is addressed through an analysis of controversial contemporary political claims and their engagement with strategies that aim to improve the sustainability of agriculture and food consumption. To shed light on ongoing changes and the future of food, this book asks important environmental and social questions and analyses how industrial agriculture has played out in various contexts. It is recommended supplementary reading for postgraduates and researchers in agricultural studies, food studies, food policy, the agri-food political economy and political and economic geography.
Download or read book Uncertain Democracy written by Lincoln A. Mitchell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In November of 2003, a stolen election in the former Soviet republic of Georgia led to protests and the eventual resignation of President Eduard Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze was replaced by a democratically elected government led by President Mikheil Saakashvili, who pledged to rebuild Georgia, orient it toward the West, and develop a European-style democracy. Known as the Rose Revolution, this early twenty-first-century democratic movement was only one of the so-called color revolutions (Orange in Ukraine, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan, and Cedar in Lebanon). What made democratic revolution in Georgia thrive when so many similar movements in the early part of the decade dissolved? Lincoln A. Mitchell witnessed the Rose Revolution firsthand, even playing a role in its manifestation by working closely with key Georgian actors who brought about change. In Uncertain Democracy, Mitchell recounts the events that led to the overthrow of Shevardnadze and analyzes the factors that contributed to the staying power of the new regime. The book also explores the modest but indispensable role of the United States in contributing to the Rose Revolution and Georgia's failure to live up to its democratic promise. Uncertain Democracy is the first scholarly examination of Georgia's recent political past. Drawing upon primary sources, secondary documents, and his own NGO experience, Mitchell presents a compelling case study of the effect of U.S. policy of promoting democracy abroad.
Download or read book Governing the Uncertain written by Monica Tennberg and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides a detailed analysis of the development of adaptive governance in Russia and Finland. It presents a case study from the Sakha Republic in Russia that focuses on community’s participation in the process of governing of the flood events in the Tatta River area. Local adaptive practices are analyzed in relation to federal and regional responses that may mandate, encourage or collide with community’s agency. A second case study is centered on the Finnish community of Kuttura, Ivalo. It explores the mounting challenges presented by changing environmental conditions to traditional reindeer herding, as well as the efforts made to cope with these new factors. Combining anthropological research and political science, this penetrating work offers revealing scrutiny of governmental responses to one of the most urgent issues facing both politicians and the citizens who live in their domains.
Download or read book Sustainable Groundwater Management written by Jean-Daniel Rinaudo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-03-16 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes and analyses the diversity of possible approaches and policy pathways to implement sustainable groundwater development, based on a comparative analysis of numerous quantitative management case studies from France and Australia. This unique book brings together water professionals and academics involved for several decades in groundwater policy making, planning or operational management to reflect on their experience with developing and implementing groundwater management policy. The data and analysis presented accordingly makes a significant contribution to the empirical water management literature by providing novel, real world insights unpublished elsewhere. The originality of the contributions also lies in the different disciplinary perspectives (hydrogeology, economics, planning and social sciences in particular) adopted in many chapters. The book offers a unique comparative analysis of France, Australia and experiences in countries such as Chile and the US to identify similarities, but also fundamental differences, which are analysed and presented as alternative policy options – these differences being mainly related to the role of the state, the community and market mechanisms in groundwater management.
Download or read book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy written by David Shearman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2007-08-30 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book presents compelling evidence that the fundamental problem behind environmental destruction—and climate change in particular—is the operation of liberal democracy. Climate change threatens the future of civilization, but humanity is impotent in effecting solutions. Even in those nations with a commitment to reduce greenhouse emissions, they continue to rise. This failure mirrors those in many other spheres that deplete the fish of the sea, erode fertile land, destroy native forests, pollute rivers and streams, and utilize the world's natural resources beyond their replacement rate. In this provocative book, Shearman and Smith present evidence that the fundamental problem causing environmental destruction—and climate change in particular—is the operation of liberal democracy. Its flaws and contradictions bestow upon government—and its institutions, laws, and the markets and corporations that provide its sustenance—an inability to make decisions that could provide a sustainable society. Having argued that democracy has failed humanity, the authors go even further and demonstrate that this failure can easily lead to authoritarianism without our even noticing. Even more provocatively, they assert that there is merit in preparing for this eventuality if we want to survive climate change. They are not suggesting that existing authoritarian regimes are more successful in mitigating greenhouse emissions, for to be successful economically they have adopted the market system with alacrity. Nevertheless, the authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power. There are in existence highly successful authoritarian structures—for example, in medicine and in corporate empires—that are capable of implementing urgent decisions impossible under liberal democracy. Society is verging on a philosophical choice between liberty or life. But there is a third way between democracy and authoritarianism that the authors leave for the final chapter. Having brought the reader to the realization that in order to halt or even slow the disastrous process of climate change we must choose between liberal democracy and a form of authoritarian government by experts, the authors offer up a radical reform of democracy that would entail the painful choice of curtailing our worldwide reliance on growth economies, along with various legal and fiscal reforms. Unpalatable as this choice may be, they argue for the adoption of this fundamental reform of democracy over the journey to authoritarianism.
Download or read book The New Politics of Numbers written by Andrea Mennicken and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-11 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers.
Download or read book The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights written by Radu Mares and published by Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. This book was released on 2011-12-09 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruggie's reports with a special emphasis on regulatory and governance issues surrounding corporate responsibility. How does international human rights law handle corporations? Are we beginning to grasp the complexities and impacts of financial markets on human rights? What kind of corporate due diligence can make supply chains more socially sustainable? Why should parent companies act when their affiliates infringe rights? What is the potential of national human rights institutions in the area of business and human rights? What is the role of states and law in the social change process promoted by the corporate responsibility movement? How do we 'orchestrate' polycentric governance regimes to ensure respect for human rights?
