{"title":"Grassroots Initiatives as Political Actors: Scaling, Capture and Constituency in Food Policy Councils","authors":"Francesca Fiore, Giuseppe Feola, Francesca Piló","doi":"10.1002/eet.2156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2156","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Grassroots initiatives (GIs) play a crucial role in driving sustainability transitions. They adopt different approaches to exert impact through multi-stakeholder governance platforms, such as ‘scaling up’, ‘scaling through’ and ‘amplifying’. This paper argues that understanding how GIs achieve this impact requires viewing them as political actors and recognising multi-stakeholder governance platforms as inherently political spaces. Analysing the history of two food policy councils (FPCs) as case studies, the paper develops and applies a conceptual framework that highlights the political agency and power of GIs in sustainability transitions leading to both sociotechnical and sociopolitical change. Drawing on the concept of ‘constituency’ from social movement studies, the study highlights the political power of GIs to impact sustainability transitions with democratising aims. The findings reveal that the political context—shaped by factors such as a history of collaboration, institutional proximity, and varying levels of competition between state authorities at distinct administrative levels —profoundly influences how FPCs function as political spaces and the approaches enacted by GIs to exercise political power and agency. The study underscores the need for future research to better account for the sociopolitical and cultural context, political power, agency, and different models of impact in sustainability transitions.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"559-579"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2156","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Deliberative Turn or Business as Usual? Assessing the Deliberative Capacity of the Swedish Mining Governance System","authors":"Andreas Johansson","doi":"10.1002/eet.2159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2159","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In response to the increasing conflicts over natural resources, such as minerals, several states, including Sweden, have turned to deliberative democratic practices as a means of governance. Yet, despite significant efforts to incorporate deliberative elements into Sweden's mining governance system, the system falls short of fulfilling the promises typically associated with deliberative democracy, such as effective conflict management. This paper explores this paradox by examining how deliberation has been implemented in the system's institutional design and evaluates the extent to which it fosters conditions conducive to deliberation aligned with the ideals of deliberative democracy. The findings reveal a notable expansion of deliberative practices within the institutional design, particularly through provisions requiring consultation and dialogue with actors affected by mining and related activities. However, substantial deficiencies remain, especially regarding participant selection mechanisms, the prescriptions for participant interactions and the connection between these interactions and decision-making. These shortcomings hinder the realization of ideal deliberation, offering a compelling explanation for the system's difficulties in managing escalating conflicts. In response to these challenges, the study recommends institutional reforms aimed at enhancing the system's democratic qualities. Furthermore, it highlights the need for future research to investigate various institutional designs and their impact on deliberation within different governance systems. Such research could illuminate how these designs either facilitate or obstruct effective deliberation, ultimately contributing to the advancement of democracy and the ability of governance systems to address escalating natural resource conflicts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"547-558"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2159","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144196961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Benjamin Hofmann, Manuel Fischer, Karin Ingold, Eva Lieberherr, Sabine Hoffmann
{"title":"Knowledge Cumulation at Science-Policy Interfaces: Opportunities for Environmental Governance Research","authors":"Benjamin Hofmann, Manuel Fischer, Karin Ingold, Eva Lieberherr, Sabine Hoffmann","doi":"10.1002/eet.2155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2155","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>To increase the societal impact of environmental governance research, scholars have called for knowledge cumulation, meaning that scientific evidence builds more systematically on previous findings. Our article develops the perspective that such knowledge cumulation takes place not only within academia but also at science-policy interfaces (SPIs). Drawing on literature on knowledge integration, synthesis, and use as well as science-policy literature, we outline five opportunities for knowledge cumulation at SPIs: (1) proximity to democratic discourse and decision-making; (2) suitability for inter- and transdisciplinary integration; (3) combined problem and solution focus; (4) potential to increase the generality of scientific findings; and (5) creation of targeted synthesis products. We illustrate their respective benefits and challenges with empirical examples from SPIs for climate change, biodiversity and natural resources, and food systems. We conclude that SPIs are an important locus for cumulating knowledge used in complex environmental governance and that future research could explore how this interacts with knowledge cumulation in the academic realm.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"538-546"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Institutional Design of Collaborative Water Governance: The River Chief System in China","authors":"Xiaomeng Zhou, Yanliu Lin, Pieter Hooimeijer, Jochen Monstadt","doi":"10.1002/eet.2152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2152","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Collaborative governance has been increasingly applied in the field of water governance. However, this approach is often criticized for overlooking the political nature of water governance and the necessity of collaboration across multiple dimensions. The river chief system (RCS) in China represents a collaborative water governance approach designed to address collaboration challenges in Chinese water governance sector and ultimately combat its severe river pollution. This study develops a conceptual framework to analyze the institutional design of the RCS and examine its effectiveness in structuring vertical, horizontal, and territorial collaborations in local water governance. Taking the RCS in Xiamen as a case study, we find that public entities predominantly engage in collaborative initiatives mandated by higher-level authorities, while collaborations between state and nonstate actors mainly focus on information collection and public environmental education. The collaborative processes under the RCS are characterized by the unchallenged authority of political leaders, exclusive decision-making mechanisms, restricted information flows, implicit pay-off structures, and limited involvement of nonstate actors. Consequently, the institutional design of the RCS falls short in fostering effective multidimensional collaboration among diverse actors. This study contributes to the literature on collaborative governance by offering insights into the institutional design of collaborative water governance within an authoritarian context and sheds lights on China's recent reforms of environmental governance.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"525-537"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2152","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197647","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tracing the Path of Knowledge on “Environmental Governance Processes” for Theory-Building","authors":"Liza Wood, Francesca Pia Vantaggiato, Tyler Scott","doi":"10.1002/eet.2151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2151","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The vast range of environmental governance case studies makes one thing clear: social processes are at the heart of environmental problems—and solutions. But fragmentation in how different contributions define and study environmental governance processes prevents us from drawing lessons from the field. What is the extent of knowledge cumulation in the field, and what gaps remain unfilled in this literature? We address these questions by analyzing the bibliometric citation network of English language academic research focused on environmental governance processes. We identify eight clusters of research, where four highly cited “poles” stand out: (1) social-ecological systems, (2) collaborative governance, (3) global environmental governance, and (4) political ecology. We identify four organizing concepts that are common to all clusters (scale, the importance of social outcomes, consideration of the environment, and the role of government), but with limited shared understandings of them. The field is wider than it is deep, limiting our ability to narrow down on a few overarching theoretical statements. We argue that environmental governance needs to link up with the environmental politics literature to be able address two important roadblocks in environmental governance processes: power asymmetries and trade-offs of environmental decisions.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"505-524"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Laurence Guillaumie, Samuel Éric Kamgang, Marie-Christine Brotherton, Olivier Boiral
{"title":"Achieving Sustainable Development Goals Through the Governance of Local Food Systems in Western Countries: A Realist Synthesis","authors":"Laurence Guillaumie, Samuel Éric Kamgang, Marie-Christine Brotherton, Olivier Boiral","doi":"10.1002/eet.2153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2153","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Over the last decade, various studies have focused on the functioning of local food policy councils and their key role in institutionalizing participatory governance mechanisms involving stakeholders concerned with the promotion of sustainable food systems. Nevertheless, the literature remains scattered, inconclusive, and mostly dissociated from the sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are increasingly used by organizations and government agencies alike. Based on a systematic analysis of 99 academic articles, this realist synthesis sheds light on sustainability outcomes and key success factors of local food system governance. Findings show that local food systems can play a significant role in achieving sustainability, although the coverage of the SDGs remains very uneven across the objectives considered. The study also shows the key role of several collaborative governance principles—including broad participation, facilitative leadership, and consensus-building—in the success of these systems. Contributions to the literature and managerial implications are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"488-504"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2153","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197508","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nikki J. J. Theeuwes, Marjanneke J. Vijge, Koen Beumer
{"title":"Is Policy Coherence Leaving No One Behind? Analyzing Gender Inequality in the Governance of the Sustainable Development Goals in India","authors":"Nikki J. J. Theeuwes, Marjanneke J. Vijge, Koen Beumer","doi":"10.1002/eet.2154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2154","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The pledge to Leave No One Behind is central to the 2030 Agenda and cuts across all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To realize this cross-sectoral approach to inequality, policy coherence is considered an important tool. This article questions whether and how policy coherence leaves no one behind. We focus on the often-overlooked politics of policy coherence by studying gender inequalities in institutions, interests, and ideas in subnational governance processes for SDG implementation in India. Our findings show that policy coherence does not automatically reach the furthest behind in India. Despite ambitions to Leave No One Behind, SDG policy coherence processes are built around pre-existing, unequal and often siloed government structures, interests, and ideas. While this enhances national ownership, it also perpetuates inequalities in SDG policy coherence processes, including around gender. We argue that paradoxically, in seeking to implement all the SDGs equally for all, countries need to prioritize between competing goals in which historically prioritized institutions, interests, and ideas prevail over others. The article raises important questions about the universal applicability of policy coherence as means to achieve the SDGs and calls for further research on the synergies and trade-offs between policy coherence and Leave No One Behind in different (sub)national contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"471-487"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2154","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Analysing Coherence in Policy for Multi-Functional Landscapes: An Exploratory Framework","authors":"Frida Öhman, Mikael Karlsson","doi":"10.1002/eet.2149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2149","url":null,"abstract":"<p>To address biodiversity loss and other negative environmental effects of land use, science and policy are increasingly recognising multi-functional landscape governance. This approach involves place-based policymaking across multiple governance levels, engaging various stakeholders and balancing multiple landscape values and functions. Due to the complexity involved, calls have been made for additional research addressing institutional challenges, policy coherence and practical tools and frameworks. This article introduces a novel framework for analysing coherence in multi-functional landscape governance, designed to be useful for both researchers and policymakers in land use contexts. The exploratory framework is inspired by multiple policy frameworks such as the European Landscape Convention and IPBES and draws from the two literatures on multi-functional landscape governance and policy coherence. By applying this framework, users can systematically analyse trade-offs and synergies between multiple, interacting policies, with a focus on landscape, multi-functionality and stakeholders throughout policy processes. The study includes an illustrative application of the framework to the EU Biodiversity Strategy and the Swedish Forest Strategy, revealing a lack of coherence on a series of parameters of relevance for biodiversity protection, including critical policy instruments. The article concludes by identifying areas that warrant further research to advance multi-functional landscape governance and thereby potentially improve biodiversity protection.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"450-470"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2149","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regulations ‘Under the Weather’: Legal Factors of Stability and Change for the Implementation of Natural Stormwater Management in Finland","authors":"Francesco Venuti, Aleksi Heinilä, Peter R. Davids","doi":"10.1002/eet.2150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2150","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The implementation of natural stormwater management (SWM), namely SWM carried out through nature-based solutions (NBS), is still problematic despite their benefits in climate change adaptation. Private landownership is commonly cited as the factor limiting extensive NBS. However, the Finnish model demonstrates that, regardless of whether the needed land is private or public, implementing actors face numerous legal challenges in efforts to carry out SWM using NBS. We study the Finnish SWM and land use planning frameworks to uncover the legal barriers to and drivers of NBS implementation as well as the interaction of the frameworks with the wider governance setting. By doing so, we highlight the need for a regulatory approach to NBS that will facilitate their uptake. We first explore how the Finnish legal framework regulates natural SWM. Secondly, we use the policy arrangement approach (PAA) and the framework on stability and change in flood risk management to combine the results of the legal analysis with the findings from a series of interviews with urban planners from several Finnish municipalities. This in turn enables us to visualise how the law interacts with the broader governance system to limit and shape the options for implementing natural SWM. The main factors of stability (namely, keeping the status quo) for NBS include the lack of regulations and unclear and fragmented SWM responsibilities. The main factors encouraging change include cities' acquisition or ownership of public land, an integrated governance approach to SWM, the Green Area Factor (GAF), pilot projects and stormwater working groups.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"431-449"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/eet.2150","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Knowledge cumulation and interdisciplinarity: Integrating epistemologies, disciplines, and sectors to produce actionable environmental governance research","authors":"Liza Khmara","doi":"10.1002/eet.2146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/eet.2146","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For environmental governance research (EGR) to be actionable to catalyze solutions for environmental challenges in policy and praxis, it must allow for knowledge cumulation that demonstrates the applicability of EGR to existing and future issues, improves the robustness and validity of EGR, and identifies conditions, causal mechanisms and other underlying features of environmental governance. It is recognized that EGR cannot produce such knowledge without integrating various disciplines to connect environmental issues with their political dimensions and implications. Yet, EGR resembles a “fragmented adhocracy” that lacks standardized theoretical frameworks, concepts, and research approaches. To overcome this disciplinary fragmentation and develop mechanisms to effectively aggregate environmental governance evidence, it is critical to understand knowledge cumulation processes and identify research practices that can impede the integration of knowledge. This narrative review examines the dimensions of EGR to argue that (1) knowledge cumulation in EGR lies in interdisciplinary knowledge integration; and (2) EGR will only fulfill its goals of informing policy and praxis if knowledge cumulation between researchers is considered as a precondition of actionable knowledge.</p>","PeriodicalId":47396,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Policy and Governance","volume":"35 3","pages":"416-430"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144197606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}