Suchergebnisse

"Utopian thought and experimental approaches to societal organization have been rare in the last decades of planning and politics. Instead, there is a widespread belief in ecological modernization, that sustainable societies can be created within the frame of the current global capitalist world order by taking small steps such as eco-labeling, urban densification, and recycling. However, in the context of the current crisis in which resource depletion, climate change, uneven development, and economic instability are seen as interlinked, this belief is increasingly being questioned and alternative developmental paths sought. This collection demonstrates how utopian thought can be used in a contemporary context, as critique and in exploring desired futures. The book includes theoretical perspectives on changing global socio-environmental relationships and political struggles for alternative development paths, and analyzes micro-level practices in co-housing, alternative energy provision, use of green space, transportation, co-production of urban space, peer-to-peer production and consumption, and alternative economies. It contributes research perspectives on contemporary green utopian practices and strategies, combining theoretical and empirical analyses to spark discussions of possible futures"--

The article provides insight into the contemporary international bioenergy debate and scrutinizes how the idea of biofuel production as a win-win-win solution to energy insecurity, climate change, and agricultural stagnation came into being, what discursive forces bind such a conceptualization, and where dislocations arise. Based on critical assumptions of discourse theory developed by Laclau and Mouffe, the analysis explores assessments, reports, policy papers, and other central documents from three influential international organizations—the International Energy Agency, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—that provide an entry point to the global debate on biofuels. We show that the bioenergy concept occupies specific positions and conveys different meanings within the three overlapping discourses of energy, climate, and agriculture. These three discursive areas are further "sutured" around the notion of biofuel production, where a hegemonic thread of the capitalist market economics, fixated on economic growth and presupposing the necessity of cost-effectiveness, results in internal contradictions and dislocations within the win-win-win conceptualization, emptying bioenergy of any content.

The article provides insight into the contemporary international bioenergy debate and scrutinizes how the idea of biofuel production as a win-win-win solution to energy insecurity, climate change, and agricultural stagnation came into being, what discursive forces bind such a conceptualization, and where dislocations arise. Based on critical assumptions of discourse theory developed by Laclau and Mouffe, the analysis explores assessments, reports, policy papers, and other central documents from three influential international organizations—the International Energy Agency, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—that provide an entry point to the global debate on biofuels. We show that the bioenergy concept occupies specific positions and conveys different meanings within the three overlapping discourses of energy, climate, and agriculture. These three discursive areas are further "sutured" around the notion of biofuel production, where a hegemonic thread of the capitalist market economics, fixated on economic growth and presupposing the necessity of cost-effectiveness, results in internal contradictions and dislocations within the win-win-win conceptualization, emptying bioenergy of any content.

The article provides insight into the contemporary international bioenergy debate and scrutinizes how the idea of biofuel production as a win-win-win solution to energy insecurity, climate change, and agricultural stagnation came into being, what discursive forces bind such a conceptualization, and where dislocations arise. Based on critical assumptions of discourse theory developed by Laclau and Mouffe, the analysis explores assessments, reports, policy papers, and other central documents from three influential international organizations—the International Energy Agency, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization—that provide an entry point to the global debate on biofuels. We show that the bioenergy concept occupies specific positions and conveys different meanings within the three overlapping discourses of energy, climate, and agriculture. These three discursive areas are further "sutured" around the notion of biofuel production, where a hegemonic thread of the capitalist market economics, fixated on economic growth and presupposing the necessity of cost-effectiveness, results in internal contradictions and dislocations within the win-win-win conceptualization, emptying bioenergy of any content.

For coastal areas across the world, sea level rise and problems of coastal erosion and coastal flooding are expected to increase over the next hundred years. At the same time political pressure for continued waterfront planning and development of coastal areas threatens to increase our societal vulnerability, and necessitating climate adaptation in coastal zone management. The institutional dimension has been identified as important for ensuring a more robust adaptation to both current climate variability and future climate change. In this paper, lessons regarding institutional constraints for climate adaptation are drawn from a Swedish case-study on local coastal zone management, illustrating the diverse and complex nature of institutional capacity-building. The aim of the paper is to illustrate critical factors that from an institutional perspective condition the capacity to achieve a more integrated, strategic and proactive climate adaptation and for turning "rules on paper" to working practice, based on case-study experiences from Coastby. Following and expanding a framework for analysing institutional capacity-building we learnt that a selective few key actors had played a critical role in building a strong external networking capacity with a flip-side in terms of a weak internal coordinating capacity and lack of mutual ownership of coastal erosion between sectoral units e.g. risk-management, planning and environment. We also found a weak vertical administrative interplay and lack of formal coherent policy, procedures and regulations for managing coastal erosion between local, regional and national administrations. Further, tensions and trade-offs between policy-agendas, values and political priorities posed a barrier for capacity-building in coastal zone management which calls for processes to mediate conflicting priorities in policy-making, planning and decision-making. The case-study suggests that the ability of the political administrative system to acknowledge and deal with institutional conflicts is a critical condition for ensuring an integrated and proactive climate adaptation in coastal zone management. ; Original Publication:Sofie Storbjörk and Johan Hedrén, Institutional capacity-building for targeting sea-level rise in the climate adaptation of Swedish coastal zone management: Lessons from Coastby, 2011, Ocean and Coastal Management, (54), 3, 265-273.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2010.12.007Copyright: Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam.http://www.elsevier.com/

Taking into account intersecting trends in political, academic, and popular engagements with environmental issues, this paper concerns the development of environmental humanities as an academic field of inquiry, specifically in this new era many are calling the Anthropocene. After a brief outline of the environmental humanities as a field, we delimit four problems that currently frame our relation to the environment, namely: alienation and intangibility; the post-political situation; negative framing of environmental change; and compartmentalization of "the environment" from other spheres of concern. Addressing these problems, we argue, is not possible without environmental humanities. Given that this field is not entirely new, our second objective is to propose specific shifts in the environmental humanities that could address the aforementioned problems. These include attention to environmental imaginaries; rethinking the "green" field; enhanced transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity; and increasing "citizen humanities" efforts. ; Please note, I have emailed a parallell publishable copy over designated emailadress to you. ; The Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory

This paper asks how the social sciences can engage with the idea of the Anthropocene in productive ways. In response to this question we outline an interpretative research agenda that allows critical engagement with the Anthropocene as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories. In order to facilitate the kind of political mobilization required to meet the complex environmental challenges of our times, we argue that the social sciences should refrain from adjusting to standardized research agendas and templates. A more urgent analytical challenge lies in exposing, challenging and extending the ontological assumptions that inform how we make sense of and respond to a rapidly changing environment. By cultivating environmental research that opens up multiple interpretations of the Anthropocene, the social sciences can help to extend the realm of the possible for environmental politics. ; Funding Agencies: research project 'Novel Forms of Governance by Nested Networks (NESNET)' by the German Ministry for Education and Research, Funding Initiative "Research on the Relationship between Science, Politics and Society" KZ 01UZ1003 Linköping University