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The expansion of the fishing industry in the last century has raised concerns over the long-term viability of many fish species. International fisheries have failed to prevent the overfishing of many stocks but have succeeded in curtailing harvests for some key fisheries. This book develops a theoretical approach, the vulnerability response framework, which can increase the understanding of the countries’ positions on the management of international fisheries based on linkages between domestic vulnerabilities and national policy positions. Vulnerability, mainly economic in this context, acts as an indicator for domestic susceptibility to the increasing competition associated with open access and related stock declines. Because of this relationship, it can also be used to trace the trajectory of the countries’ positions on fishery management as they seek political alternatives to economic problems. The author tests this framework by using it to predict national positions for eight cases drawn from the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT). These studies reveal that there is considerable variance in the management measures which ICCAT has adopted—both among different species and in dealing with the same species over time—much of which can be traced to vulnerability response behavior. Little attention has been paid to the ways in which international regimes change over time. The book’s approach illuminates the pressures for change that are generated by economic competition and overexploitation in Atlantic fisheries, and also identifies patterns of adaptive governance, as national responses to such pressures culminate in patterns of change in international management.

The United States lost almost one-third of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. As higher-paying manufacturing jobs are replaced by lower-paying service jobs, income inequality has been approaching third world levels. In particular, between 1990 and 2013, the median income of men without high school diplomas fell by an astonishing 20 percent, and that of men with high school diplomas fell by a painful 13 percent. Innovation has been left largely to software and IT startups, and increasingly U.S. firms operate on a system of “innovate here/produce there,” leaving the manufacturing sector behind. This book explores how to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector. It argues that advanced manufacturing, which employs such innovative technologies as 3-D printing, advanced material, photonics, and robotics in the production process, is the key. The book discusses transformative new production paradigms that could drive up efficiency and drive down costs. It describes the new processes and business models that must accompany them, and explores alternative funding methods for startups that must manufacture. The book examines the varied attitudes of mainstream economics toward manufacturing, the post-Great Recession policy focus on advanced manufacturing, and lessons from the new advanced manufacturing institutes. Finally, it considers the problem of “startup scale-up,” possible new models for training workers, and the role of manufacturing in addressing “secular stagnation” in innovation, growth, the middle classes, productivity rates, and related investment.

The United States and other nations are facing large-scale risks at an accelerating rhythm. In 2005, three major hurricanes—Katrina, Rita, and Wilma—made landfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast within a six-week period. The damage caused by these storms led to insurance reimbursements and federal disaster relief of more than $180 billion—a record sum. Today we are more vulnerable to catastrophic losses because of the increasing concentration of population and activities in high-risk coastal regions of the country. The question is not whether but when, and how frequently, future catastrophes will strike and the extent of damages they will cause. Who should pay the costs associated with catastrophic losses suffered by homeowners in hazard-prone areas? This book analyzes how we currently mitigate, insure against, and finance recovery from natural disasters in the United States. It offers long-term solutions for reducing losses and providing financial support for disaster victims that define a coherent strategy to assure sustainable recovery from future large-scale disasters.

Collaborative approaches are increasingly common across a range of governance and policy areas. Single-issue, single-organization solutions often prove ineffective for complex, contentious, and diffuse problems. Collaborative efforts allow cross-jurisdictional governance and policy, involving groups that may operate on different decision-making levels. This book examines the full range of collaborative enterprises in natural resource management, urban planning, and environmental policy. The author explains the pros and cons of collaborative approaches, develops methods to test their effectiveness, and identifies ways to improve their implementation and results. Drawing on extensive case studies of collaboration in the United States and Australia, he shows that collaboration is not just about developing a strategy but also about creating and sustaining arrangements which can support collaborative implementation. The book outlines a typology of collaborative efforts and a typology of networks to support implementation, and uses them to explain the factors that are likely to make collaborations successful, as well as examining the implications for participants. The case studies range from watershed management to transportation planning and include both successes and failures; they also offer lessons in collaboration that make the book suited for classroom use. Additionally, the book, which is designed to help practitioners evaluate and improve collaborative efforts at any phase, has a theoretical framework that provides scholars with a means to assess the effectiveness of collaboration and explain its ability to achieve results.

Common wisdom holds that the earth’s dwindling natural resources and increasing environmental degradation will inevitably lead to interstate conflict, and possibly even set off “resource wars.” Many scholars and policymakers have considered the environmental roots of violent conflict and instability, but little attention has been paid to the idea that scarcity and degradation may actually play a role in fostering interstate cooperation. This book offers a different perspective on the links between environmental problems and interstate conflict. Although the contributors do not deny that resource scarcity and environmental degradation may become sources of contention, they argue that these conditions also provide the impetus for cooperation, coordination, and negotiation among states. The book examines aspects of environmental conflict and cooperation in detail across a number of natural resources and issues including oil, water, climate change, ocean pollution, and biodiversity conservation. The contributors argue that increasing scarcity and degradation generally induce cooperation across states, but that when conditions worsen (and a problem becomes too costly or a resource becomes too scarce), cooperation becomes more difficult. Similarly, low levels of scarcity may discourage cooperation because problems seem less urgent. With contributions from scholars in international relations, economics, and political science, the book offers an investigation of the links among scarcity, environmental degradation, cooperation, and conflict.

North American policy responses to global climate change are complex and sometimes contradictory, and reach across multiple levels of government. For example, the U.S. federal government rejected the Kyoto Protocol and mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) restrictions, but California developed some of the world's most comprehensive climate change law and regulation; Canada's federal government ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but Canadian GHG emissions increased even faster than those of the United States; and Mexico's state-owned oil company addressed climate change issues in the 1990s, in stark contrast to leading U.S. and Canadian energy firms. This book examines and compares political action for climate change across North America, at levels ranging from continental to municipal, in locations ranging from Mexico to Toronto to Portland, Maine. It investigates new or emerging institutions, policies, and practices in North American climate governance; the roles played by public, private, and civil society actors; the diffusion of policy across different jurisdictions; and the effectiveness of multilevel North American climate change governance. The book finds that although national climate policies vary widely, the complexities and divergences are even greater at the subnational level. Policy initiatives are developed separately in states, provinces, cities, large corporations, NAFTA bodies, universities, non-governmental organizations, and private firms, and this lack of coordination limits the effectiveness of multilevel climate change governance. In North America, unlike much of Europe, climate change governance has been largely bottom-up rather than top-down.

Children are among the most vulnerable citizens of the world, with a special need for the protections, rights, and services offered by states, and yet, they are particularly at risk from statelessness. Thirty-six percent of all births in the world are not registered, leaving more than 48 million children under the age of five with no legal identity and no formal claim on any state. Millions of other children are born stateless or become undocumented as a result of migration. This book examines how statelessness affects children throughout the world, looking at this largely unexplored problem from a human rights perspective. It identifies three contemporary manifestations of statelessness: legal statelessness, when people lack any nationality because of the circumstances of their birth or political and legal obstacles; de facto statelessness, when nationals of one country live illegally in another; and effective statelessness, when legal citizens lack the documentation to prove their right to state services. The human rights repercussions range from dramatic abuses (detention and deportation) to social marginalization (lack of access to education and health care). The book provides a variety of examples, including chapters on Palestinian children in Israel, undocumented young people seeking higher education in the United States, unaccompanied child migrants in Spain, Roma children in Italy, irregular internal child migrants in China, and children in mixed legal/illegal families in the United States.

Recent years have seen a series of intense, increasingly acrimonious debates over the status and legitimacy of the natural sciences. These “science wars” take place in the public arena—with current battles over evolution, and global warming—and in academia, where assumptions about scientific objectivity have been called into question. Given these hostilities, what makes a scientific claim merit our consideration? This book examines what makes scientific arguments cogent—that is, strong, convincing, and “logically compelling”—and how we should assess that cogency. Drawing on the tools of argumentation theory, the author proposes a multidimensional, context-sensitive framework both for understanding and for conducting cooperative interdisciplinary evaluation of the cogency of actual scientific arguments. He closely examines Jürgen Habermas’s argumentation theory and its implications for understanding cogency, applying it to a case from high-energy physics. A series of problems, however, beset Habermas’s approach. In response, the author outlines his own “critical contextualist” approach, which uses argumentation-theory categories in a new and more context-sensitive way that is inspired by the ethnography of science.

This book investigates the process of information disclosure as a policy strategy for environmental protection. The process, which is a new approach to environmental protection, sometimes leads government and industry to focus on meeting only minimal standards. The authors examine the effectiveness of information disclosure in achieving improvements in corporate environmental performance by analyzing data from the federal government’s Toxics Release Inventory, or TRI, and drawing on an original set of survey data from corporations and federal, state, and local officials, among other sources. The authors find that TRI, a prime example of information disclosure, has had a substantial effect over time on the environmental performance of industry. When examining case studies from all over the United States, the conclusion is that improvement is not uniform: some facilities perform much better than others. The authors argue that information disclosure plays an important role in environmental policy—but only as part of an integrated set of policy tools that includes conventional regulation.

Our morning cups of coffee connect us to a global industry and, also, to an export crisis in the tropics that is destroying livelihoods, undermining the cohesion of families and communities, and threatening ecosystems. This book explores the crisis facing small-scale coffee farmers of Mexico and Central America, the political economy of the global coffee industry, the coffee producers’ response to this crisis, and the initiatives that claim to promote more sustainable rural development among coffee-producing communities. The contributors review the historical, political, economic, and agroecological processes involved in today’s coffee industry and analyze the severely depressed export market that small-scale growers in Mexico and Central America encounters. The book presents a series of interdisciplinary case studies showing how small-scale farmers manage ecosystems and organize collectively as they seek useful collaboration with international NGOs and coffee companies to create opportunities for themselves in the coffee market. The findings demonstrate the interconnections between the livelihoods of farmers, biodiversity, conservation, and changing coffee markets. Additional chapters examine alternative trade practices, certification, and eco-labeling, and discuss the politics and market growth of organic, shade-grown, and Fair Trade coffees.

In today’s globally integrated food system, events in one part of the world can have multiple and wide-ranging effects, as has been shown by the recent and rapid global rise in food prices. Transnational corporations (TNCs) have been central to the development of this global food system, dominating production, international trade, processing, distribution, and retail sectors. Moreover, these global corporations play a key role in the establishment of rules and regulations by which they themselves are governed. This book examines how TNCs exercise power over global food and agriculture governance, and what the consequences are for the sustainability of the global food system. It defines three aspects of this corporate power: instrumental power, or direct influence; structural power, or the broader influence corporations have over setting agendas and rules; and discursive, or communicative and persuasive, power. The book begins by examining the nature of corporate power in cases ranging from “green” food certification in Southeast Asia and corporate influence on US food aid policy to governance in the seed industry and international food safety standards. Chapters examine such issues as the promotion of corporate-defined “environmental sustainability” and “food security,” biotechnology firms and intellectual property rights, and consumer resistance to genetically modified organisms and other cases of contestation in agrobiology. In the final chapter, the editors raise the question of how to achieve participation, transparency and accountability in food governance.

Complexity, division, mistrust, and “process paralysis” can thwart leaders and others when they tackle local challenges. This book shows how civic capacity—the capacity to create and sustain smart collective action—can be developed and used. In an era of sharp debate over the conditions under which democracy can develop while broadening participation and building community, it argues that understanding and building civic capacity is crucial for strengthening governance and changing the state of the world in the process. More than managing a contest among interest groups or spurring deliberation to reframe issues, democracy can be what the public most desires: A recipe for significant progress on important problems. The author examines efforts in six cities in the United States, Brazil, India, and South Africa, which face the millennial challenges of rapid urban growth, economic restructuring, and investing in the next generation. These challenges demand the engagement of government, business, and nongovernmental sectors. The keys to progress include the ability to combine learning and bargaining continually, to forge multiple forms of accountability, and to find ways to leverage the capacity of the grassroots and what the author terms the “grasstops,” regardless of who initiates change or who participates over time. Civic capacity can—and must—be developed, even in places that lack traditions of cooperative civic action.

In an era of globalization, issues of language diversity have economic and political implications. Transnational labor mobility, trade, social inclusion of migrants, democracy in multilingual countries, and companies’ international competitiveness all have a linguistic dimension; yet economists in general do not include language as a variable in their research. This volume demonstrates that the application of rigorous economic theories and research methods to issues of language policy yields valuable insights. The contributors offer both theoretical and empirical analyses of such topics as the impact of language diversity on economic outcomes, the distributive effects of policy regarding official languages, the individual welfare consequences of bilingualism, and the link between language and national identity. Their research is based on data from countries including Canada, India, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia and from the regions of Central America, Europe, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Theoretical models are explained intuitively for the nonspecialist. The relationships among linguistic variables, inequality, and the economy are approached from different perspectives, including economics, sociolinguistics, and political science. For this reason, the book offers a substantive contribution to interdisciplinary work on languages in society and language policy, proposing a common framework for a shared research area Contributors: Alisher Aldashev, Katalin Buzási, Ramon Caminal, Alexander M. Danzer, Maxime Leblanc Desgagné, Peter H. Egger, Ainhoa Aparicio Fenoll, Michele Gazzola, Victor Ginsburgh, Gilles Grenier, François Grin, Zoe Kuehn, Andrea Lassmann, Stephen May, Serge Nadeau, Suzanne Romaine, Selma K. Sonntag, Stefan Sperlich, José-Ramón Uriarte, François Vaillancourt, Shlomo Weber, Bengt-Arne Wickström, Lauren Zentz

Not so long ago, people North and South had little reason to believe that wealth from oil, gas, and coal brought anything but great prosperity. But the presumption of net benefits from fossil fuels is eroding as widening circles of people rich and poor experience the downside. A positive transition to a post-fossil fuel era cannot wait for global agreement, a swap-in of renewables, a miracle technology, a carbon market, or lifestyle change. This book shows that it is now possible to take the first step toward the post-fossil fuel era, by resisting the slow violence of extreme extraction and combustion, exiting the industry, and imagining a good life after fossil fuels. It shows how an environmental politics of transition might occur, arguing for going to the source rather than managing byproducts, for delegitimizing fossil fuels rather than accommodating them, for engaging a politics of deliberately choosing a post-fossil fuel world. The book includes several chapters of analyses of the fossil fuel problem from the biophysical, cultural, ethical and political perspectives along with case studies that reveal how individuals, groups, communities, and an entire country have taken first steps out of the fossil fuel era, with experiments that range from leaving oil under the Amazon to ending mountaintop removal in Appalachia.

The legacy of environmental catastrophe in the states of the former Soviet Union includes desertification, pollution, and the toxic aftermath of industrial accidents, the most notorious of which was the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. This book examines the development of environmental activism in Russia and the former Soviet republics in response to these problems, and its effect on policy and planning. It also shows that because of increasing economic, ethnic, and social inequality in the former Soviet states, debates over environmental justice are beginning to come to the fore. The book explores the varying environmental, social, political, and economic circumstances of these countries—which range from the Western-style democracies of the Baltic states to the totalitarian regimes of Central Asia—and how they affect the ecological and environmental situation and public health. Among the topics covered are environmentalism in Russia (including the progressive nature of its laws on environmental protection, which are undermined by overburdened and underpaid law enforcement); the effect of oil wealth on Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan; the role of nationalism in Latvian environmentalism; the struggle of Russia’s indigenous peoples for environmental justice; public participation in Estonia’s environmental movement; and lack of access to natural capital in Tajikistan. The book makes clear that although fragile transition economies, varying degrees of democratization, and a focus on national security can stymie progress toward “just sustainability,” the diverse states of the former Soviet Union are making some progress toward “green” and environmental justice issues separately.

Environmental justice concerns form an important part of popular environmental movements in many countries. Activists, scholars, and policymakers in the developing world, for example, increasingly use the tools of environmental justice to link concerns over social justice and environmental well-being. This book investigates the emergence of a distinctively Latin American environmental justice movement, offering analyses and case studies that examine both the promise and the limits of environmental justice in Latin America and the Caribbean—both as a rallying point for popular mobilization and as a set of principles for analysis and policymaking. After considering such conceptual issues as the connection between environmental conditions and race, trade, and social justice, it presents a series of case studies. These studies focus first on industrial development, examining such topics as social tension over “megadevelopment” projects in Argentina and the concentrated industrial waste hazards of the export assembly plants at the U.S.–Mexico border, and then on the power and politics involved in land and resource use. Other chapters explore ecotourism; inequitable land distribution in Brazil; the ongoing struggle for justice and accountability over the former U.S. Navy bombing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico; and water policy in Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico. Taken together, the analyses and case studies suggest that environmental justice—which highlights both broader issues of global injustice and local concerns—holds promise as a way to understand and address environmental inequities in Latin America and elsewhere.

The idea of sacrifice is the unspoken issue of environmental politics. Politicians, the media, and many environmentalists assume that well-off populations won’t make sacrifices now for future environmental benefits and won’t change their patterns and perceptions of consumption to make ecological room for the world’s three billion or so poor who are eager to improve their standard of living. This book challenges these assumptions, arguing that they limit our policy options, weaken our ability to imagine bold action for change, and blind us to the ways sacrifice already figures in everyday life. The concept of sacrifice has been unexamined in both activist and academic conversations about environmental politics, but this book confronts it directly. The chapters bring a variety of disciplinary perspectives to the topic. Contributors offer alternatives to the conventional wisdom on sacrifice, identifying connections between sacrifice and human fulfilment in everyday life, and finding such concrete examples as parents’ sacrifices in raising children, religious practice, artists’ pursuit of their art, and soldiers and policemen who risk their lives to do their jobs. They examine particular policies and practices that shape our understanding of environmental problems, including the carbon tax, cycling incentives, and the perils of green consumption. This book puts “sacrifice” into the conversation about effective environmental politics and policies, insisting that activists and scholars do more than change the subject when the idea is introduced.

The EU has, for a long time, portrayed itself as an international leader on climate change. Previous studies have tended to focus on the characteristics of EU leadership, but have failed to examine the extent to which EU leadership generates “followership”. This book analyzes EU climate policies towards China and India in order to provide a holistic assessment of EU climate leadership, and makes three key arguments. First, EU engagement was driven by a desire to build the international role of the EU, but also from 2000 onwards in particular by growing normative concern and material interest within the EU regarding combating climate change. The development of engagement was also conditioned by the broader development of EU relations with China and India. Second, EU engagement took the form of institutionalized dialogue and capacity-building projects. These were generally more extensive in the EU-China case; the EU-India relationship was significantly more limited. Third, the Chinese Government responded through limited normative emulation and limited but growing lesson-drawing through bilateral cooperation in specific sectors. While the Indian Government also responded through limited normative emulation, the principal Indian response was resistance. Moreover, both the Chinese and Indian Governments resisted the EU approach to the international climate change negotiations. The book concludes that the EU has been a highly restricted leader in its relations with China and India on climate change.

Agriculture in the United States today increasingly operates in two separate spheres: Large, corporate-connected commodity production and distribution systems; and small-scale farms that market directly to consumers. As a result, midsize family-operated farms find it increasingly difficult to find and reach markets for their products. They are too big to use the direct marketing techniques of small farms but too small to take advantage of corporate marketing and distribution systems. This crisis of the midsize farm results in a rural America with weakened municipal tax bases, job losses, and population flight. This book discusses strategies for reviving an “agriculture of the middle” and creating a food system that works for midsize farms and ranches. Activists, practitioners, and scholars from a variety of disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics, consider ways in which midsize farms can regain vitality by scaling up aspects of small farms’ operations to connect with consumers, organizing together to develop markets for their products, developing food supply chains that preserve farmer identity and are based on fair business agreements, and promoting public policies (at international, federal, state, and community levels) which address agriculture-of-the-middle issues. The book makes it clear that the demise of midsize farms and ranches is not a foregone conclusion and that the renewal of an agriculture of the middle will benefit all participants in the food system, from growers to consumers.

During the past four decades Los Angeles and Hong Kong have come to play a critical role in the flow of goods, people, and capital; in the changes in production and consumption; and in the urban environmental issues that have taken root as a result of the changes they have experienced. The book evaluates the issues associated with those changes, including how LA and Hong Kong have become connected to China and its key urban regions such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the Pearl River Delta. Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and several of China’s mega-cities have become global in their activities and reach through their financial, political and economic roles as well as the cultural, environmental, and demographic shifts that have taken place. The book documents the history and protracted nature of six urban environmental issues in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China. These include ports and freight traffic (or goods movement), air quality, water supply and water quality, the food environment, transportation, and open and public space. It identifies contrasting development patterns, important similarities, and comparative trends and strategies. The book further analyzes how urban environmental issues have risen to the top of the policy agendas in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and China, where and how changes are being explored and where change is possible, and where and how such changes have been blocked or undermined.