Drawing on an extensive range of political, legal and sociological materials, the author presents and evaluates environmental policy-making in France at a time when environmental problems are growing in complexity and gravity. He highlights the range of inputs to the policy process - including popular movements, green parties, interest group representation, EU legislation and international treaties - and evaluates the diverse nature of the outcomes which lead him to conclude that because new developments involve not only changes in policy content but also adaptation of policy style, environmental demands are progressively changing the shape of politics itself.
This book analyzes the history and growth of the French environmental movement from its origins in the "back to the earth" wave of the early 1970s to its current influence on every political party from the Trotskyist left to the extreme right of the National Front. .
Challenging the conventional wisdom that French environmentalism can be dated only to the post-1945 period, Caroline Ford argues that a broadly shared environmental consciousness emerged in France much earlier. Natural Interests unearths the distinctive features of French environmentalism, in which a large and varied cast of social actors played a role. Besides scientific advances and colonial expansion, nostalgia for a vanishing pastoral countryside and anxiety over the pressing dangers of environmental degradation were important factors in the success of this movement. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, war, political upheaval, and natural disasters—especially the devastating floods of 1856 and 1910 in Paris—caused growing worry over the damage wrought by deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization. The natural world took on new value for France’s urban bourgeoisie, as both a site of aesthetic longing and a destination for tourism. Not only naturalists and scientists but politicians, engineers, writers, and painters took up environmental causes. Imperialism and international dialogue were also instrumental in shaping environmental consciousness, as the unfamiliar climates of France’s overseas possessions changed perceptions of the natural world and influenced conservationist policies. By the early twentieth century, France had adopted innovative environmental legislation, created national and urban parks and nature reserves, and called for international cooperation on environmental questions.
Citizens of industrialized countries largely share a sense that their national governance is inadequate, believing not only that governments are incapable of making the right policy decisions, but also that the entire network of state and civil society actors responsible for the discussion, negotiation and implementation of policy choices is untrustworthy. Using agro-environmental policy development in France, the United States, and Canada as a case study, Eric Montpetit sets out to investigate the validity of citizens' mistrust through careful attention to the policy-making performance of the relevant policy networks. He concludes that distrust in policy networks is, for the most part, misplaced because high levels of performance by policy networks are more common than citizens appear to expect. Moreover, his analysis reveals that policy networks providing for a participation in governance to powerful interest groups and strong government bureaucracies are more likely to succeed in producing sound environmental policies for agriculture. A timely and crucial contribution to the good governance debate, this book should be required reading for policy-makers and politicians, as well as students and scholars of public policy, political science, environmental studies, and government.
The world is in the midst of a storm that has shaped the history of modernity along a double fracture: on the one hand, an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities and, on the other, a colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular. In this important new book, Malcom Ferdinand challenges this double fracture, thinking from the Caribbean world. Here, the slave ship reveals the inequalities that continue during the storm: some are shackled inside the hold and even thrown overboard at the first gusts of wind. Drawing on empirical and theoretical work in the Caribbean, Ferdinand conceptualizes a decolonial ecology that holds protecting the environment together with the political struggles against (post)colonial domination, structural racism, and misogynistic practices. Facing the storm, this book is an invitation to build a world-ship where humans and non-humans can live together on a bridge of justice and shape a common world. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental humanities and Latin American and Caribbean studies, as well as anyone interested in ecology, slavery, and (de)colonization.
During the nineteenth century, the development and codification of forest science in France were closely linked to Provence's time-honored tradition of mobile pastoralism, which formed a major part of the economy. At the beginning of the century, pastoralism also featured prominently in the economies and social traditions of North Africa and southwestern Anatolia until French forest agents implemented ideas and practices for forest management in these areas aimed largely at regulating and marginalizing Mediterranean mobile pastoral traditions. These practices changed not only landscapes but also the social order of these three Mediterranean societies and the nature of French colonial administration. In Nomad's Land Andrea E. Duffy investigates the relationship between Mediterranean mobile pastoralism and nineteenth-century French forestry through case studies in Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. By restricting the use of shared spaces, foresters helped bring the populations of Provence and Algeria under the control of the state, and French scientific forestry became a medium for state initiatives to sedentarize mobile pastoral groups in Anatolia. Locals responded through petitions, arson, violence, compromise, and adaptation. Duffy shows that French efforts to promote scientific forestry both internally and abroad were intimately tied to empire building and paralleled the solidification of Western narratives condemning the pastoral tradition, leading to sometimes tragic outcomes for both the environment and pastoralists.
As the time-scales of natural change accelerate and converge with those of society, Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society takes the reader into largely uncharted territory in its exploration of anthropogenic climate change. Current material is used to highlight the global impact of this issue, and the necessity for multidisciplinary and global social science research and teaching to address the problem. The book is multidisciplinary and worldwide in scope, with contributors spanning specialisms including agro-forestry, economics, environmentalism, ethics, human geography, international relations, law, politics, psychology, sociology and theology. Their global knowledge is reflected in the content of the text, which encompasses chapters on American, European and Chinese policies, case studies of responses to disasters and of the new technological and lifestyle alternatives that are being adopted, and the negotiations leading up to the Copenhagen conference alongside a preface assessing its outcomes. Starting with an initial analysis by a leading climatologist, key issues discussed in the text include recent findings of natural scientists, social causation and vulnerability, media and public recognition or scepticism, and the merits and difficulties of actions seeking to mitigate and adapt. This accessible volume utilizes a wealth of case studies, explains technical terms and minimises the use of acronyms associated with the subject, making it an essential text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduate students and researchers in the social sciences.
The Paris Framework for Climate Change Capacity Building pioneers a new era of climate change governance, performing the foundational job of clarifying what is meant by the often ad-hoc, one-off, uncoordinated, ineffective and unsustainable practices of the past decade described as 'capacity building' to address climate change. As an alternative, this book presents a framework on how to build effective and sustainable capacity systems to meaningfully tackle this long-term problem. Such a reframing of capacity building itself requires means of implementation. The authors combine their decades-long experiences in climate negotiations, developing climate solutions, climate activism and peer-reviewed research to chart a realistic roadmap for the implementation of this alternative framework for capacity building. As a result, this book convincingly makes the case that universities, as the highest and sustainable seats of learning and research in the developing countries, should be the central hub of capacity building there. This will be a valuable resource for students, researchers and policy-makers in the areas of climate change and environmental studies.
