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COVID-19 and Climate Change in BRICS Nations: Beyond the Paris Agreement and Agenda 2030 (Routledge Advances in Climate Change Research)
by Ndivhuho Tshikovhi Andréa Santos Xiaolong Zou Fulufhelo Netswera Irina Zotovna Yarygina Sriram DiviThis book provides a quantitative and qualitative overview of the overall impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa’s (BRICS countries) capacity to re-shape global climate governance and explore areas for mutual cooperation. BRICS countries account for nearly 40% of the total world population and are thus intrinsic to the global efforts and results for Agenda 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and beyond. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic does not at first appear to be directly related to BRICS’ policies to address climate change, but it has influenced the pace and nature of climate action due to the loss of human and financial capital. This book examines this correlation and raises awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts and potential solutions on BRICS’ climate strategies. Drawing on case studies from each country, the authors use examples from urban governance, energy transitions strategy, foreign investment and more to illustrate how COVID-19 has negatively or positively impacted climate data and draw wider conclusions about the long-term climate policies that may be implemented. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental politics and governance and global development studies.
Covid-19 and Global Inequalities: Vulnerable Humans (Routledge Studies in Environment and Health)
by Victor Jeleniewski SeidlerThis timely and powerful autoethnography traces the spread of and responses to Covid-19: from the uncertainty surrounding its outbreak, to its devastating and continued aftermath. Following the virus in real time, it explores the fears, risks and responses to the global pandemic, and how it has shaped our everyday lives against the backdrop of social and political upheaval, and the looming climate crisis.Social theorist and moral philosopher, Victor Jeleniewski Seidler, discusses fundamental questions of inequality and injustice regarding race, class and gender brought to the fore by the visibility of varying risk levels, vulnerabilities and protections provided by legislative measures against the virus. This interdisciplinary analysis scrutinises values, ethics, responsibilities and uncertain futures formed by the global health crisis, and evaluates media and communications strategies, government responses and political communications at domestic and international levels. Seidler shares critical insights into the cultural history of pandemics, highlighting lessons to be learned from anticipating, preparing for and enduring moments of crisis. Perceiving how the pandemic and climate emergency are interwoven, the book concludes with an urgent call to rebuild sustainable economic, political and ecological imaginations.This wide-reaching volume will appeal to a broad academic readership in environmental studies, sociology, philosophy, health studies, cultural studies, gender studies, media and communication.
Cow Hug Therapy: How the Animals at the Gentle Barn Taught Me about Life, Death, and Everything in Between
by Ellie LaksThe inspirational story of the compassionate and wise animals of the Gentle Barn and how they became a therapeutic salve for countless guests — and mentors for all of us in how to live and die In Cow Hug Therapy, Ellie Laks recounts the extraordinary journey that started with her first teacher, Buddha — not the religious figure, but a rescued miniature Hereford cow. One evening Buddha wrapped her neck around an exhausted and upset Ellie and transferred a singular form of healing and comfort with an incredible impact. Understanding that this was something to be shared with others, Ellie developed Cow Hug Therapy, a groundbreaking approach to emotional healing that has proved effective for trauma, illness, disabilities, addiction, grief, and stress. This colorful and compelling narrative introduces the healing mavens of the barnyard, each with a unique story of being rescued from trauma and treated with love and respect. In their new role at Ellie’s Gentle Barn sanctuaries, these animals have transformed lives and ignited breakthroughs and newfound purpose for visitors including a young mother who lost her baby, a suicidal teenager, a wounded serviceman, an open-heart-surgery patient, and many more. A testament to empathy and the mission to heal animals, people, and the planet, Cow Hug Therapy serves as a beacon of hope for all seeking healing and connection.
Creative Design and Innovation: How to Produce Successful Products and Buildings
by Robin RoyUsing many real-world examples and cases, this book identifies key factors and processes that have contributed to the creation of successful new products, buildings, and innovations, or resulted in some failures. Such factors include the creativity of individuals and groups, their sources of inspiration, the processes of creative design and innovation, and the characteristics of the products, buildings, and innovations themselves. Much has been written about creativity and innovation, but what helps to foster creativity, enable creative ideas to be translated into practical designs, and ensure those new products or buildings succeed as innovations on the market or in use? This book discusses these elements through the author’s origination and analysis of examples and case studies ranging from the revolutionary innovation of the smartphone, through radical innovations in domestic appliances and sustainable housing, to creative designs of contemporary jewellery. The broad range of examples and cases include product and fashion design, filmmaking and fine art, as well as industrial design, engineering, and architecture, offering lessons for creatives, designers, and innovators from many subject backgrounds. Analysis of the different factors, successes, and failures are presented in text boxes throughout the book to allow readers to easily understand the key lessons from each example or case, with numerous colour visuals, diagrams, and charts for illustration. This book is a must-read for a broad audience interested in creativity, design, and innovation, including practitioners in design, engineering, architecture, and product management, and students and instructors of those subjects.
Critical Realism and the Objective Value of Sustainability: Philosophical and Ethical Approaches (Routledge Environmental Ethics)
by Gabriela-Lucia SabauCritical Realism and the Objective Value of Sustainability contributes to the growing discussion surrounding the concept of sustainability, using a critical realist approach within a transdisciplinary theoretical framework to examine how sustainability objectively occurs in the natural world and in society. The book develops an ethical theory of sustainability as an objective value, rooted not in humans’ subjective preferences but in the holistic web of relationships, interdependencies, and obligations existing among living things on Earth, a web believed to have maintained life on Earth over the last 3.7 billion years. It proposes three pillars of sustainability ethics: contentment for the human existence given to us; justice (beyond distributive justice); and meaningful freedom (within ecological and moral limits). Using abductive reasoning, the book infers that there is an out-of-this-world Sustainer behind the Earth’s sustainability acting as a metaphysical source of all being and value. It argues that sustainability value, accepted as a shared understanding of the common good, must guide individual decisions and socio-economic development efforts as a matter of deliberate choice, as well as be built on the awareness that there are non-negotiable, pre-established conditions for our planet’s sustainability. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across fields of inquiry, including sustainability, sustainable development, environmental philosophy and ethics, philosophy of science, and ecological economics, and to whoever may wonder why seasons exists and why humans have creative minds.
Critical Sustainability Sciences: Intercultural and Emancipatory Perspectives (Routledge Studies in Sustainability)
by Stephan Rist Patrick Bottazzi Johanna JacobiThis book explores Critical Sustainability Sciences, a new field of scientific inquiry into sustainability issues. It builds on a highly novel integration of elements from relational ontologies, critical theory, political ecology, and intercultural philosophy in support of emancipatory perspectives on sustainability and development. The book Critical Sustainability Sciences begins by uncovering the weaknesses of mainstream sustainability science and debates on sustainable development. The new field of Critical Sustainability Sciences has grown out of a deep engagement with relational ontologies, which helps to overcome the dualist ontology underlying mainstream notions of sustainability and development. Dualist ontologies reinforce problematic anthropocentric divisions, for example, between humans and nature, subjects and objects, mind and matter, body and soul, etc. Examples from indigenous peoples in Bolivia, India, and Ghana – as well as integrative movements in Chile, Brazil, and Europe – show that relational conceptions of life, rooted in ecosophy and cosmosophy, can provide an intercultural philosophical foundation for Critical Sustainability Sciences. The book concludes by describing three key topics for exploration in Critical Sustainability Sciences: societal reorganization in view of emancipatory, existential, and cognitive self-determination; living labor and commons; and the development of new comprehensive relational scientific paradigms. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners of emancipatory and intercultural approaches to sustainability and development.
Cross-Border Integration of Renewable Energy Systems: Experiences, Impacts, and Drivers
by Venkatachalam Anbumozhi and Bhupendra Kumar SinghCross-border energy trade and integration of renewable energy have become significant for countries and regions to meet demands, minimize costs, and foster socio-economic and climate stability in the dynamic and unstable energy market. This book explores different models of global energy trade between regions and their benefits and challenges with a special focus on India’s Northeast region. Countries in South and Southeast Asia are endowed with abundant renewable energy resources. This book examines the energy mix of the countries such as India, Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Bhutan among others and their efforts to achieve more integrated markets and renewable energy integration in the region. It highlights the potential of Northeast India given its rich natural resources and strategic location to harness the potential cross-border energy trade with ASEAN countries. The volume provides analytical perspectives on drivers, constraints, opportunities and barriers, as well as measures that countries could take to address institutional, financial, policy, and governance issues to minimize the total costs of energy security and maximize the social-economic benefits for people in these regions. It identifies the necessary conditions – grid flexibility, policy, market, and regulatory solutions for clean energy trade – and contributes to growth of low-carbon development as well as policy making by focusing on renewable energy integration across borders. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of energy and climate studies, environmental politics, trade, and economics and international relations. This book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Cultivating Continuity of the European Landscape: New Challenges, Innovative Perspectives (Environmental History #15)
by Mauro Agnoletti Saša Dobričič Tessa Matteini Juan Manuel PalermThis edited volume reviews 20 years’ worth of research under the European Landscape Convention. The authors from the research network UNISCAPE offer readers insights into their combined efforts to carry out and support the goals of a sustainable European landscape. 20 years after defining these original goals, the editors make landscape ecology and management, a cornerstone for the debate on a 21st century Europe. The numerous contributions cover the three major areas of Landscape Policy and Governance, Landscape Design and Time and Observing Landscape. The pan-European approach highlights the strength of international collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking.This book offers the collected knowledge as a working tool for researchers, scholars and professionals in landscape ecology.
Cultural Violence, Stigma and the Legacy of the Anti-Sealing Movement
by Danita Catherine BurkeThis book injects nuance into the debate about the moral legitimacy of environmental and animal activism and explores how activism can lead to stigma and destruction of minority group identities, cultural practices and community structures. It takes readers back to ground zero of the anti-sealing movement – Newfoundland and Labrador. This book sheds light on the human costs of activists and the repercussions for vulnerable people when activism normalizes forms of violence as acceptable to achieve their desired outcomes. Inspired by Greenpeace Canada’s apology to Canadian Inuit, Indigenous and coastal peoples, this book brings into focus the local peoples who were targeted by activists and media outlets and left behind once the cultural and economic structures of the sealing industry and sealing practices were severely damaged by activist stigmatization and the global outcry against rural and coastal peoples and their practices. Drawing upon literature on cultural violence and archival research, this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of international relations, development studies, public policy, sustainability studies and Indigenous studies.
Cycling Through the Pandemic: Tactical Urbanism and the Implementation of Pop-Up Bike Lanes in the Time of COVID-19 (The Urban Book Series)
by Nathalie Ortar Patrick RératThis open access book provides insight on how the tactical urbanism has the capacity to influence change in mobility practices such as cycling. COVID-19 crisis prompted the public authorities to rethink the use of public space in order to develop means of transport that are both efficient and adapted to the health context and their effects on cycling practices in Europe, North, and South America. Its contributors collectively reveal and evidence through policies analysis, mapping, and innovative qualitative analysis bridging video and interviews, how those new infrastructures and policies can be a trigger for change in a context of mobility transition.This book provides an important element on the way local authorities can act in a quicker and more agile way. While some decisions are specific to the context of the beginning of the pandemic, the analysis offers lessons on the way to implement the transition toward a low-carbon mobility, on the importance of processes based on trials and errors, on the political stakes of reallocating road space.
A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century
by Daniel R. Brooks Salvatore J. AgostaHow humanity brought about the climate crisis by departing from its evolutionary trajectory 15,000 years ago—and how we can use evolutionary principles to save ourselves from the worst outcomes.Despite efforts to sustain civilization, humanity faces existential threats from overpopulation, globalized trade and travel, urbanization, and global climate change. In A Darwinian Survival Guide, Daniel Brooks and Salvatore Agosta offer a novel—and hopeful—perspective on how to meet these tremendous challenges by changing the discourse from sustainability to survival. Darwinian evolution, the world&’s only theory of survival, is the means by which the biosphere has persisted and renewed itself following past environmental perturbations, and it has never failed, they explain. Even in the aftermath of mass extinctions, enough survivors remain with the potential to produce a new diversified biosphere.Drawing on their expertise as field biologists, Brooks and Agosta trace the evolutionary path from the early days of humans through the Late Pleistocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene all the way to the Great Acceleration of technological humanity around 1950, demonstrating how our creative capacities have allowed humanity to survive. However, constant conflict without resolution has made the Anthropocene not only unsustainable, but unsurvivable. Guided by the four laws of biotics, the authors explain how humanity should interact with the rest of the biosphere and with each other in accordance with Darwinian principles. They reveal a middle ground between apocalypse and utopia, with two options: alter our behavior now at great expense and extend civilization or fail to act and rebuild in accordance with those same principles. If we take the latter, then our immediate goal ought to focus on preserving as many of humanity&’s positive achievements—from high technology to high art—as possible to shorten the time needed to rebuild.
Death Valley Summer (Wilder Boys)
by Brandon WallaceTwo brothers try to lead lost campers to safety in the fourth adventure of the Wilder Boys series.The boys help out at a wilderness camp near Sequoia National Park, a day&’s drive south of the Sierras. The camp&’s main draw is a multi-day trek traversing woodlands, mountains, and desert during a team-based orientation competition that will take them to the edge of Death Valley. When Jake and Taylor&’s team counselor is badly hurt in a flash flood, they must galvanize the lost campers to find shelter, aid the injured counselor, and supplement their low supplies with what can be found around them. At first, stumbling across a ghost town seems like a lucky break from the scorching heat of summer, but the town is already occupied by counterfeiters who are none too pleased about their operation being discovered. The boys must use all their resourcefulness and knowledge of the outdoors to protect their teammates from the criminals and the elements.
Delivering a Climate Neutral Europe
by Jos DelbekeDelivering a Climate Neutral Europe summarises the achievements of 25 years of EU Climate Policy, with the emphasis on what has been achieved under the Green Deal. It also highlights climate issues on the table of policy makers in the next European policy cycle 2024–2029.Curated by Jos Delbeke, one of the foremost experts in this field, the chapters are all written by responsible officials of the EU Commission services, who were deeply involved in the negotiations related to the legislation they prepared. They explain how ambitious targets were prepared for 2030 and 2050 in view of implementing the commitments taken in 2015 under the Paris Agreement and present the overall architecture of the policy to counter the idea that an avalanche of legislative action is being developed without much structure. In particular, this book examines the carbon pricing tool that Europe implemented under the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), the differentiated targets Member States have to deliver and climate-relevant EU legislation in the fields of energy, transport, industry, finance and agriculture and forestry. The authors also discuss the upcoming headwinds in the form of a growing scepticism in public opinion, and the impact of the wars in the close neighbourhood of the European continent.Written as a follow-up to previous publications EU Climate Policy Explained and Towards a Climate-Neutral Europe, this new volume will be a vital resource for students, scholars and policy makers alike who are researching and working in the areas of climate change, environmental governance and EU policy more broadly.
Deploying the European Green Deal: Protecting the Environment Beyond the EU Borders (Routledge Studies in Environmental Policy)
by Mar Campins EritjaDrawing on a range of expert contributions, this book explores how the European Green Deal is being deployed in practice and observes how the EU tries to promote the protection of the environment in third countries. This book begins by assessing the state of the art in terms of the key conceptual issues and analyses sectoral initiatives that are particularly relevant for the deployment of the European Green Deal external dimensions. These include the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the EU’s regulatory action in the control of maritime emissions, the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, the Deforestation Initiative, the Zero Pollution Initiative, the From Farm to Fork Initiative, and the Climate Neutrality and Clean Energy Initiative in the context of the Energy Charter Treaty. Next, the authors deal with horizontal aspects of the European Green Deal that also have external dimensions, such as the Green Deal Diplomacy, the Green Public Procurement, funding measures, initiatives related to corporate sustainability and due diligence, and the implementation and enforcement of EU environmental law. This volume concludes with a cross-cutting analysis, focusing on how the EU can strengthen the impact of its normative power on international environmental governance, while also noting its limitations. Deploying the European Green Deal will be of great interest to students and scholars of international and EU environmental law and environmental policy and governance.
Deploying the European Green Deal: Protecting the Environment Beyond the EU Borders (Routledge Studies in Environmental Policy)
by Mar Campins EritjaDrawing on a range of expert contributions, this book explores how the European Green Deal is being deployed in practice and observes how the EU tries to promote the protection of the environment in third countries.This book begins by assessing the state of the art in terms of the key conceptual issues and analyses sectoral initiatives that are particularly relevant for the deployment of the European Green Deal external dimensions. These include the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the EU’s regulatory action in the control of maritime emissions, the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy, the Deforestation Initiative, the Zero Pollution Initiative, the From Farm to Fork Initiative, and the Climate Neutrality and Clean Energy Initiative in the context of the Energy Charter Treaty. Next, the authors deal with horizontal aspects of the European Green Deal that also have external dimensions, such as the Green Deal Diplomacy, the Green Public Procurement, funding measures, initiatives related to corporate sustainability and due diligence, and the implementation and enforcement of EU environmental law. This volume concludes with a cross-cutting analysis, focusing on how the EU can strengthen the impact of its normative power on international environmental governance, while also noting its limitations.Deploying the European Green Deal will be of great interest to students and scholars of international and EU environmental law and environmental policy and governance.Chapter 10 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Desalination and Water Security (Earthscan Studies in Water Resource Management)
by Chris AnastasiDesalination is to the water industry what renewables are to the electricity sector. However, unlike renewables, the former is being deployed in a quiet revolution away from public glare. This book provides a holistic view of desalination, highlighting the important role this technology can play in providing safe access to water across the globe. It describes the context for this technology to flourish in the coming decades. It discusses the pressures on freshwater resources and the key role the desalination industry plays as it moves from a good-to-have provider today to a must-have mainstream water solution in the future. The book explores the vital elements of the desalination industry, including the winning technologies and how further technological developments will reduce costs and increase deployment into new areas. It also addresses the energy used and the key environmental issues of carbon dioxide emissions and brine waste production. Using a series of country case studies, the book illustrates how desalination can supplement natural water resources in different environments and for different purposes, and how it is supporting domestic and economic activity. Providing a forward-thinking assessment, the book considers developments over the next 30 years as climate change impacts become even more apparent. This book will be of great interest to those working to alleviate water scarcity and improve water security. It will also be of interest to those in water resource management, water policy and regulation, water science, and environmental engineering.
Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation and Retreat in the Pyrocene
by Emily Schlickman Brett MilliganAcross the world, the risks of wildfires are increasing and expanding. Due to past and current human actions, we dwell in the age of fire – the Pyrocene – and the many challenges and climate adaptation questions it provokes. Exploring our past and current relationships with fire, this book speculates on the pyro futures yet to be designed and cared for. Drawing upon fieldwork, mapping, drone imagery, and interviews, this publication curates 27 global design case studies within the vulnerable and dynamic wildland-urban interface and its adjacent wildlands. The book catalogs these examples into three approaches: those that resist the creative and transformative power of fire and forces of landscape change, those that embrace and utilize those forces, and those that intentionally try to retreat and minimize human intervention in fire-prone landscapes. Rather than serving as a book of neatly packaged solutions, it is a book of techniques to be considered, tested, and evaluated in a time of fire.
Designing Knowledge Economies for Disaster Resilience: Case Studies from the African Diaspora (Catastrophes in Context #7)
by Pamela Waldron-MooreDisaster research has been studied from many angles, seldom targeting its implications for vulnerable territories in Africa. Entities most subject to the effects of climate change are often undeveloped and located in disadvantaged regions. Post-disaster communities need to scrutinize the social, political, economic, and cultural structures that stagnate sustainable growth. Acknowledging that low economic development and high climate costs cannot coexist, this collected volume interrogates the challenge for disaster-prone territories to determine strategies for restructuring and redesigning their environment. This book proposes the creation of knowledge economies, whereby empowered communities may produce innovative knowledge translatable across the African diaspora.
Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South
by Ayurella Horn-MullerKudzu abounds across the American South. Introduced in the United States in the 1800s as a solution for soil erosion, this invasive vine with Eastern Asian origins came to be known as a pernicious invader capable of smothering everything in its path. To many, the plant’s enduring legacy has been its villainous role as the “vine that ate the South.” But for a select few, it has begun to signify something else entirely. In its roots, a network of people scattered across the country see a chance at redemption—and an opportunity to rewrite a fragment of troubled history.Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South detangles the complicated story of the South’s fickle relationship with kudzu, chronicling the ways the boundless weed has evolved over centuries, and dissecting what climate change could mean for its future across the United States. From architecture teams experimenting with it as a sustainable building material, to clinical applications treating binge-drinking, to chefs harvesting it as a wild edible, environmental journalist Ayurella Horn-Muller spotlights how kudzu’s notorious reputation in America is gradually being cast aside in favor of its promise.Weaving careful research with personal stories, Horn-Muller investigates how kudzu morphed from a miraculous agricultural solution to the monstrous archetypal foe of the southern landscape. Devoured is a poignant narrative of belonging, racial ambiguity, outsiders and insiders, and the path from universal acceptance to undesirability. It is a deeply reported exploration of the landscapes that host the many species we fight to control. Above all, Devoured is an ode to the earth around us—a quest for meaning in today’s imperiled world.
Die unsichtbaren Folgen des Extraktivismus: Ein Blick hinter die slow violence der chilenischen Bergbauindustrie (Energiepolitik und Klimaschutz. Energy Policy and Climate Protection)
by Anna LandherrDieses Open-Access-Buch beschäftigt sich mit Umweltproblemen, die selbst im Kontext der heutigen globalen ökologischen Krise weitgehend gesellschaftlich unsichtbar bleiben, da sie ihre oftmals schwerwiegenden sozial-ökologischen Auswirkungen allmählich, schleichend und über längere Zeiträume hinweg in Form einer slow violence (Rob Nixon) entfalten. Am Beispiel der toxischen Industrieabfälle (Tailings) der chilenischen Bergbauindustrie werden in der Untersuchung anhand von drei Fallstudien die zentralen Gründe und Dimensionen dieser Unsichtbarkeit dargestellt und ihr Zusammenspiel analysiert.
Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert
by Sunaura TaylorA powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance. Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires.
Disaster Management in India: Policies, Institutions, Practices
by Rajendra K. PandeyThis book explores policies, structures, and processes of disaster management in India examining key theoretical foundations of disaster management with practical illustrations and case studies. The book offers a comprehensive understanding of disaster management policies and practices in India and focuses on public policy approaches in addressing critical issues and challenges facing the machinery and processes of disaster management in India. The creative approach to deal with different aspects of disaster management has helped in holistic delineation of a number of critical themes such as legal frameworks of disaster management, good practices, use of innovative approaches and technology, multilateral cooperation, the role of civil society organisations, among others. This book will be of interest to the students and researchers working in the field of disaster studies, geography, geology, development studies, public administration, public policy, economics, and governance. It will also be an invaluable companion for policy makers, practitioners, academicians and development planners working in the area of disaster management.
Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology
by Liliana DoganovaA pioneering exploration of the defining traits and contradictions of our relationship to the future through the lens of discountingForest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova&’s book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.
Discovering Political Ecology
by Gustav Cederlöf Alex LoftusPolitical ecology is one of the most vibrant fields of environmental research. This book introduces political ecology to a new generation of students in a daring new way: as an interdisciplinary approach to environmental research but also as a series of lived realities and a praxis for change. The origins of political ecology are often traced through an Anglo-American canon. In Discovering Political Ecology, Gustav Cederlöf and Alex Loftus instead take up the challenge of presenting the key conversations and the diverse traditions that have shaped this field with attention to its extensive international roots. Inspired by voices and research in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, the authors address the concerns of those who from different social backgrounds have grown up in a world shaped by climate change and increasing environmental inequalities.Engaging and accessible in style, Discovering Political Ecology introduces a set of key concepts around which conversations in political ecology coalesce. It also shows how these concepts allow you to make sense of some of the most pressing issues of our time—issues around water, energy, agriculture, forestry, climate change and environmental justice. Each chapter includes learning outcomes and suggested further readings, extensive bibliographies and seminar activities to be used by students and educators. At the cutting edge of the field, the book will be of interest to those in all disciplines brought together in political ecology, including but not limited to anthropology, development studies, ecology, geography, history and political science.
Diskursive Dynamiken und Policy-Wandel in der EU-Energiepolitik: Eine Blended-Reading-Diskursanalyse des ordentlichen Gesetzgebungsverfahrens der EU von 1992 bis 2019 (Studien der NRW School of Governance)
by Tobias RammelWie lässt sich Policy-Wandel in der Europäischen Union erklären? Tobias Rammel beantwortet diese Frage erstmals für die Gesamtheit des ordentlichen Gesetzgebungsverfahrens zur EU-Energiepolitik von 1992 bis 2019 im Rahmen einer Blended-Reading-Diskursanalyse. Rekurrierend auf eine Analyse des Forschungsstandes zur EU-Energiepolitik wird in diesem Buch argumentiert, dass eine theoretische Synthese der Arbeiten zur Diskursanalyse und zum Policy-Wandel die bisherigen Defizite der klassischen Theorieschulen ausgleichen kann. Methodisch wird in einem innovativen dreistufigen Forschungsdesign auf eine Blended-Reading-Kombination von Close-Reading in Form von unüberwachten Text-Mining-Verfahren (Topic Modeling) zur induktiv-explorativen Vorstrukturierung der Analyse und Distant-Reading in Form einer qualitativen Feinanalyse zur Interpretation und Kontextualisierung der Daten zurückgegriffen. Damit liefert das Buch eine bislang einzigartige und differenzierte Erklärung für Policy-Wandel und die dazugehörigen diskursiven Dynamiken zwischen den EU-Institutionen im COD der EU-Energiepolitik von 1992 bis 2019.