Suchergebnisse

The Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change first legitimized state-to-state carbon trading in 1997 with the goal of cost-effectively reducing carbon emissions. Voluntary carbon markets for private trading have emerged since, often claimed by their proponents to pioneer innovative projects that reduce poverty as well as carbon emissions. We use the case of a cookstove project, financed by the carbon emissions reductions generated when rural Kenyan women switch from traditional to energy-efficient cookstoves, to illuminate the complex process through which 'charismatic' pro-poor carbon offsets are produced. We highlight the role of women's labor in creating the initial carbon emissions reductions, which then become tradable virtual commodities through a series of studies to measure and verify the associated carbon savings, as well as the signing of a contract that transfers the property rights to the verified savings from the stove user to an international nonprofit carbon credit developer. We argue that, while introducing some improvements in cooking time, smoke level, and labor, the improved cookstove carbon offset ultimately constitutes a gendered, ongoing accumulation by decarbonization that, by securing the means of future wealth that could be generated from the project for investors in the Global North, marginalizes rural Kenyan women.

Sponge City Public Private Partnership (PPP) project is a significant step to promote the construction of resilient city and sustainable development. Private companies take advantage of information asymmetry and regulatory loopholes to take opportunistic behavior, which affects the project delivery quality and public interests. In order to reveal the decision-making mechanism of the main stakeholders, this paper constructs an evolutionary game model of private companies, citizens and the government from a fresh perspective of perceived value. First, the traditional payoff matrix is modified by combining Prospect Theory and Mental Accounting. Next, this paper analyzes the strategic evolution law and stability conditions of game players by replicated dynamic equation. Finally, Nanganqu project is used for empirical simulation to verify the effectiveness of this model. Results indicate that, (1) due to the complexity of the project and the bounded rationality of the participants, there is no evolutionary stable strategy in this game system. (2) The behavioral decision of participants is affected by perceived incomes and perceived costs. (3) Government punishment and reputation loss can effectively curb the opportunistic behavior. All above studies are expected to improve the management of Sponge City PPP projects, providing theoretical guidance for the government to make scientific decisions.

Total-factor energy efficiency (TFEE) is widely used to measure energy efficiency under the data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework, but the efficiencies obtained from DEA are structurally biased upward, and thus TFEE tends to overestimate energy efficiency. This research thus applies the bootstrapped DEA approach to correct the bias of TFEE. Using a dataset consisting of 30 provinces of China in the period 2016–2019, the bootstrapped-based test supports technology with variable returns to scale. The biased-corrected TFEE also indicates that energy consumption on average can be scaled down by 42.36%, rather than the biased value of 19.4%. The bootstrapped clustering partitions provinces into three groups: Cluster 1, with Guizhou as the representative medoid, includes half of the superior coastal provinces in terms of actual energy consumption and TFEE and half of the competitive inland provinces, whereas Cluster 3 outperforms Cluster 2 in terms of TFEE, but the actual energy consumption is higher, with Shandong and Hebei as the representative medoids, respectively. Lastly, empirical results imply that the northeast and central regions need more government attention and resources to practice sustainable development and improve TFEE.

AbstractIn a risk society, the survival and development of humans are facing threats of complex and severe public crisis events. Public participation in collaborative governance (CG) of public crisis events is increasingly recognized as an important direction for the reform of the current and future emergency management system. Previous studies of CG have mainly focused on the macro level and ignored to address micro‐level discussions of the behavioral strategy evolution of stakeholders. From a fresh value perception perspective, this study constructs an evolutionary game model to clarify the evolution mechanism of multi‐level emergency CG. First, the value perception model is built based on Prospect Theory and Mental Accounting to optimize the traditional game matrix. Second, the evolutionary stability is analyzed to solve the system evolution law. Finally, numerical simulation is conducted in the case of Heilongjiang province, a main region of food and energy supply in China. Results showed that (1) the CG game system has a complex evolutionary path; (2) the behavior of game players is affected by perceived incomes and perceived costs; (3) compared with the reference value and the risk aversion coefficient of income accounts, game players are more sensitive to that of cost accounts; (4) enhancing the perceived value of public psychological satisfaction and government reputation is helpful for the long‐term construction of CG. Overall, this study aims to highlight the potential utility of value perception in promoting effective implementations of CG and to provide new insights for the development of CG in China and other countries.