Scholarship in international law aims at addressing global forest governance comprehensively. This article reviews the recent contribution Global Forest Governance - Legal Concepts and Policy Trends by Rowena Maguire and puts it into the perspective of recent political and policy science research on global forests. While finding Maguire's volume being a very timely and valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary discussions on international forest governance, we identify some weaknesses which are mostly rooted in methodological critique and a lack of a systematic framework for analysis.
The Democracy Commission's case for participatory democracy is criticized. Participatory democracy undermines the political equality of the citizens, & requires a prevalent interest in public affairs that does not exist today. A compulsive & professional use of opinion polls on current political issues would be a better way to strengthen public political influence between elections. Adapted from the source document.
The EU Renewable Energy Strategy (RES) Directive requires that each member state obtain 20% of its energy supply from renewable sources by 2020. If fully implemented, this implies major changes in institutions, infrastructure, land use, and natural resource flows. This study applies a political geography perspective to explore the transition to renewable energy use in the heating and cooling segment of the Swedish energy system, 1980–2010. The Nordic welfare model, which developed mainly after the Second World War, required relatively uniform, standardized local and regional authorities functioning as implementation agents for national politics. Since 1980, the welfare orientation has gradually been complemented by competition politics promoting technological change, innovation, and entrepreneurship. This combination of welfare state organization and competition politics provided the dynamics necessary for energy transition, which occurred in a semi-public sphere of actors at various geographical scales. However, our analysis, suggest that this was partly an unintended policy outcome, since it was based on a welfare model with no significant energy aims. Our case study suggests that state organization plays a significant role, and that the EU RES Directive implementation will be uneven across Europe, reflecting various welfare models with different institutional pre-requisites for energy transition.
Argues that democratic citizenship consists of three related qualities: participation, influence, & involvement. The willingness of a citizen to be politically active, ie, participate in politics, is decided by the perceived probability that this activity will create political influence, & by the subjective experience of involvement in public affairs. 1 Figure. Adapted from the source document.
Vem har rätt till naturen, skogen och marken? Hur har äganderätt sett ut i Sverige historiskt, och vad grundar sig vår syn på äganderätt på? Den tidigmoderna äganderätten var inte lika strikt som den moderna – ett exempel på ett självorganiserat utnyttjande av allmänningar var fäbodväsendet. Men dessa allmänningar har minskat i takt med den biologiska mångfalden i jordbruksbygderna.
A professor in public law discusses her experience with interdisciplinary sciences, especially between public law and political science regarding peace and conflict research. Public law and political science are unified in many ways, especially after the increasing influence of the highly politicized EU-law, and have yielded good results within the study of soft law (i.e. informal rules), conflict, human trafficking, and the power of the EU jurors. However, maybe the most ambitious project of them all is the research of how states of war and dictatorships can be transferred into states of peace and democracy. Despite its many opportunities, interdisciplinary science has its problems, such as a lack of a mutual scientific language and different theoretical structures. Luckily, many of these problems can be countered with thorough planning. L. Pitkaniemi
The involvement of local communities in public space planning and design processes is widely promoted as an essential element of landscape architecture and urban design practice. Despite this, there has been little theorisation of this topic within these fields. Furthermore, the implementation of ideals and principles commonly found in theory are far from becoming mainstream practice, indicating a significant gap between the theory and practice of participation. This thesis aims to contribute to the development of theories of participation in the planning and design of public spaces. It steps away from the prevailing normative and procedural approach to theory development, and instead adopts a critical approach grounded on the deep understanding of the challenges of participation in the planning and design of public spaces. Case studies of two urban renewal projects, in Medellin, Colombia, and in Barcelona, Spain, and their participatory processes, are used for building up the theoretical contribution. The empirical and theoretical findings foreground the contextual and political nature of participatory processes. Contextual, in the sense that the implementation of ideals and principles found in theory is facilitated or hindered by the social, political and economic context in which a participatory process takes place. Political, in the sense that in complex contexts that comprise a wide range of actors, and where contrasting goals and agendas are at stake, the implementation of these theoretical ideals and principles is significantly challenged by politics involving deep differences, conflicts and power relations. The findings also show that prevailing theories of participation within landscape architecture and urban design do not take into consideration the contextual and political nature of participatory processes. This renders these theories weak in their capacity to respond to the challenges encountered by participatory processes in contemporary public space projects. This is particularly so as the dynamics of increasing pluralisation, muliticultarisation and neoliberalisation of cities create contexts that hinder the implementation of the ideals and principles found in theory, and increase the challenges caused by their political nature. Consequently, this thesis proposes a new theoretical approach to participation in the planning and design of public spaces, that allows context-based distinctions and judgements about the qualities of participatory practices for just decision-making. Difference, conflict and power are central in this approach. This thesis establishes this theoretical departure point and makes a significant contribution towards the development of the proposed theoretical approach.
En tredjedel av all mat som produceras försvinner på vägen. Det innebär att en stor del av den negativa miljöpåverkan som livsmedelsproduktionen står för, har skett alldeles i onödan. I EU:s livsmedelsstrategi är matsvinn en av nyckelfrågorna.
What is good politics? It is both a knowledge of philosophical, organizational and normative questions. It is about how and where the political science branch of the social science tree grows, of what political scientists really should do and how political science education should be conducted. By extension, it is also about which frames political order, power and social organization can best be analyzed within. There are big questions. Are there any good answers or just bad? Or could it even be that the question of what distinguishes good from bad politics leads to awkward enough paradigmatic, epistemological, and other difficult or insoluble problems that maybe we should refrain from imposing or even trying to answer it? Well, it would actually be pretty bad. Adapted from the source document.
Argues that because of its international status, the English speaking world has an overly dominant position in formulating theories, models and research problems, which the Swedish political science merely copies. Repeating studies and applying the same methods is hardly a sign of a mature and cumulative science. Swedish political science could offer much more by studying fields such as Nordic social democracy, Swedish criminal policy or Nordic far right parties with unique theories and methods. L. Pitkaniemi
Much of the effort to address environmental issues at the local level has focused on defining principles and aims rather than addressing the operational difficulties of implementation. Drawing upon insights from sustainability scholarship, this study reviews two cases: the development of a Swedish standard for implementing sustainable development at municipality, county council, and regional levels, and attempts by a small rural municipality to establish a process towards implementing the Aalborg Commitments. The research illustrates the specific organizational and managerial complexity of these case study experiences. It concludes that an organizational focus on integration and mainstreaming deserves particular attention to achieve broader sustainability, or related environmental or adaptation goals. The results, in particular, highlight the role that integrated management systems can play for sustainability work at the local level.
