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 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 1265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.
Download or read book Environmental Democracy written by Michael Mason and published by Earthscan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 282 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 Teaching Democracy in an Age of Uncertainty written by Gilbert Burgh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The strength of democracy lies in its ability to self-correct, to solve problems and adapt to new challenges. However, increased volatility, resulting from multiple crises on multiple fronts – humanitarian, financial, and environmental – is testing this ability. By offering a new framework for democratic education, Teaching Democracy in an Age of Uncertainty begins a dialogue with education professionals towards the reconstruction of education and by extension our social, cultural and political institutions. This book is the first monograph on philosophy with children to focus on democratic education. The book examines the ways in which education can either perpetuate or disrupt harmful social and political practices and narratives at the classroom level. It is a rethinking of civics and citizenship education as place-responsive learning aimed at understanding and improving human-environment relations to not only face an uncertain world, but also to face the inevitable challenges of democratic disagreement beyond merely promoting pluralism, tolerance and agreement. When viewed as a way of life democracy becomes both a goal and a teaching method for developing civic literacy to enable students to articulate and apprehend more than just the predominant political narrative, but to reshape it. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, political science, education, democratic theory, civics and citizenship studies, and peace education research.
Download or read book Sustainability Transformations Across Societies written by Björn-Ola Linnér and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparison of how societal actors in different geographical, political and cultural contexts understand agents and drivers of sustainability transformations.
Download or read book Can Democracy Handle Climate Change written by Daniel J. Fiorino and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-06-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global climate change poses an unprecedented challenge for governments across the world. Small wonder that many experts question whether democracies have the ability to cope with the causes and long-term consequences of a changing climate. Some even argue that authoritarian regimes are better equipped to make the tough choices required to tackle the climate crisis. In this incisive book, Daniel Fiorino challenges the assumptions and evidence offered by sceptics of democracy and its capacity to handle climate change. Democracies, he explains, typically enjoy higher levels of environmental performance and produce greater innovation in technology, policy, and climate governance than autocracies. Rather than less democracy, Fiorino calls for a more accountable and responsive politics that will provide democratically-elected governments with the enhanced capacity for collective action on climate and other environmental issues.
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 Affluence and Freedom written by Pierre Charbonnier and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.
Download or read book The Politics of the Anthropocene written by John S. Dryzek and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about how politics, government - and much else - needs to change in response to the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. The Holocene is the last 12,000 years of unusual stability in the Earth system. The Anthropocene is the emerging epoch of human-caused instability in the system and its life-support capacities. Dominant institutions such as states, markets, and international organizations that developed in the late Holocene are nolonger fit for purpose, and need to develop a capacity to transform themselves in response to a changing Earth system. The analysis is developed in the context of issues such as climate change,biodiversity, and global efforts to address sustainability.
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 Crises of Democracy written by Adam Przeworski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the economic, social, cultural, as well as purely political threats to democracy in the light of current knowledge.
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 Carbon written by Kate Ervine and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carbon is the political challenge of our time. While critical to supporting life on Earth, too much carbon threatens to destroy life as we know it, with rising sea levels, crippling droughts, and catastrophic floods sounding the alarm on a future now upon us. How did we get here and what must be done? In this incisive book, Kate Ervine unravels carbon's distinct political economy, arguing that, to understand global warming and why it remains so difficult to address, we must go back to the origins of industrial capitalism and its swelling dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – to grease the wheels of growth and profitability. Taking the reader from carbon dioxide as chemical compound abundant in nature to carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas, from the role of carbon in the rise of global capitalism to its role in reinforcing and expanding existing patterns of global inequality, and from carbon as object of environmental governance to carbon as tradable commodity, Ervine exposes emerging struggles to decarbonize our societies for what they are: battles over the very meaning of democracy and social and ecological justice.
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 China Goes Green written by Yifei Li and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean for the future of the planet when one of the world’s most durable authoritarian governance systems pursues “ecological civilization”? Despite its staggering pollution and colossal appetite for resources, China exemplifies a model of state-led environmentalism which concentrates decisive political, economic, and epistemic power under centralized leadership. On the face of it, China seems to embody hope for a radical new approach to environmental governance. In this thought-provoking book, Yifei Li and Judith Shapiro probe the concrete mechanisms of China’s coercive environmentalism to show how ‘going green’ helps the state to further other agendas such as citizen surveillance and geopolitical influence. Through top-down initiatives, regulations, and campaigns to mitigate pollution and environmental degradation, the Chinese authorities also promote control over the behavior of individuals and enterprises, pacification of borderlands, and expansion of Chinese power and influence along the Belt and Road and even into the global commons. Given the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions of species from extinction, we need to consider whether a green authoritarianism can show us the way. This book explores both its promises and risks.
Download or read book Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty written by Vincent A. W. J. Marchau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.
Download or read book Climate Change in the Media written by James Painter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-08-19 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists and politicians are increasingly using the language of risk to describe the climate change challenge. Some researchers have argued that stressing the 'risks' posed by climate change rather than the 'uncertainties' can create a more helpful context for policy makers and a stronger response from the public. However, understanding the concepts of risk and uncertainty - and how to communicate them - is a hotly debated issue. In this book, James Painter analyses how the international media present these and other narratives surrounding climate change. He focuses on the coverage of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the melting ice of the Arctic Sea, and includes six countries: Australia, France, India, Norway, the UK and the USA.
