For as long has humans have lived in communities, storytelling has bound people to each other and to their environments. In recent times, scholars have noted how social networks arise around issues of resource and ecological management. This book argues that stories, or narratives, play a key role in these networks - that environmental communities 'narrate themselves into existence'. The book proposes the notion of the narrative-network, and introduces innovative tools to analyse the plots, characters, and events that inform environmental action.
Introduction -- Ideology as narrative -- When skepticism became public -- Skeptics without borders -- Unpacking the genetic meta-narrative -- The social construction of climate science -- Ideological narratives and beyond in a post-truth world.
This book is the product of the 2nd World Conference on Environmental History, held in Guimarães, Portugal, in 2014. It gathers works by authors from the five continents, addressing concerns raised by past events so as to provide information to help manage the present and the future. It reveals how our cultural background and examples of past territorial intervention can help to combat political and cultural limitations through the common language of environmental benefits without disguising harmful past human interventions. Considering that political ideologies such as socialism and capitalism, as well as religion, fail to offer global paradigms for common ground, an environmentally positive discourse instead of an ecological determinism might serve as an umbrella common language to overcome blocking factors, real or invented, and avoid repeating ecological loss. Therefore, agency, environmental speech and historical research are urgently needed in order to sustain environmental paradigms and overcome political, cultural an economic interests in the public arena. This book intertwines reflections on our bonds with landscapes, processes of natural and scientific transfer across the globe, the changing of ecosystems, the way in which scientific knowledge has historically both accelerated destruction and allowed a better distribution of vital resources or as it, in today’s world, can offer alternatives that avoid harming those same vital natural resources: water, soil and air. In addition, it shows the relevance of cultural factors both in the taming of nature in favor of human comfort and in the role of the environment matters in the forging of cultural identities, which cannot be detached from technical intervention in the world. In short, the book firstly studies the past, approaching it as a data set of how the environment has shaped culture, secondly seeks to understand the present, and thirdly assesses future perspectives: what to keep, what to change, and what to dream anew, considering that conventional solutions have not sufficed to protect life on our planet.
This Handbook covers the accounts, by practitioners and observers, of the ways in which policy is formed around problems, how these problems are recognized and understood, and how diverse participants come to be involved in addressing them. H.K. Colebatch and Robert Hoppe draw together a range of original contributions from experts in the field to illuminate the ways in which policies are formed and how they shape the process of governing.
This book draws on examples from cannabis policy discourse and elsewhere to illustrate how individuals come to subscribe to a particular policy narrative; how policy narratives evolve; how narratives are employed in public policy discourse to compete with other narratives; and how, on implementation, the winning narrative is performed and subsequently institutionalized. Further, it explores how uncertainty and ambiguity are constants in public policy discourse, and how different factions and groups pursue different goals and aspirations. In the current climate of political reality, disputable facts and contestable goals, this book shows how different coalitions and ideologies use narratives to compete for policy dominance.
Urban Environmental Education Review explores how environmental education can contribute to urban sustainability. Urban environmental education includes any practices that create learning opportunities to foster individual and community well-being and environmental quality in cities. It fosters novel educational approaches and helps debunk common assumptions that cities are ecologically barren and that city people don't care for, or need, urban nature or a healthy environment. Topics in Urban Environmental Education Review range from the urban context to theoretical underpinnings, educational settings, participants, and educational approaches in urban environmental education. Chapters integrate research and practice to help aspiring and practicing environmental educators, urban planners, and other environmental leaders achieve their goals in terms of education, youth and community development, and environmental quality in cities. The ten-essay series Urban EE Essays, excerpted from Urban Environmental Education Review, may be found here: naaee.org/eepro/resources/urban-ee-essays. These essays explore various perspectives on urban environmental education and may be reprinted/reproduced only with permission from Cornell University Press.
As flooding, drought and water scarcity become more pronounced due to climate change, so the way in which these events are presented in the media assumes greater significance. In particular, the media plays an important role in shaping the public perception and understanding of water issues, and debates around extreme weather events more generally. Joanne Garde-Hansen's book offers a sustained and comprehensive exploration of media representations of water. Drawing on a wide range of media – including newspapers, digital, photography, radio, television and video, as well as empirical research on media and memory – she examines how drought, flooding and water management have been portrayed in the media, both historically and in the contemporary world. The use of the media by water institutions to manage public perceptions and the use of digital media by the public to engage with water companies is also included. A particular feature of the book is an examination of water and gender in developed nations. One of the first books to look at media representations of water, this pioneering work provides valuable insights for both scholarly and professional water research.
Theory and case studies demonstrate the analytic potential of mutually constitutive “narrative networks” in environmental governance. For as long has humans have lived in communities, storytelling has bound people to each other and to their environments. In recent times, scholars have noted how social networks arise around issues of resource and ecological management. In this book, Raul Lejano, Mrill Ingram, and Helen Ingram argue that stories, or narratives, play a key role in these networks—that environmental communities “narrate themselves into existence.” The authors propose the notion of the narrative-network, and introduce innovative tools to analyze the plots, characters, and events that inform environmental action. Their analysis sheds light on how environmental networks can emerge in unlikely contexts and sustain themselves against great odds. The authors present three case studies that demonstrate the power of narrative and narratology in the analysis of environmental networks: a conservation network in the Sonoran Desert, which achieved some success despite U.S.-Mexico border issues; a narrative that bridged differences between community and scientists in the Turtle Islands; and networks of researchers and farmers who collaborated to develop and sustain alternative agriculture practice in the face of government inaction. These cases demonstrate that by paying attention to language and storytelling, we can improve our understanding of environmental behavior and even change it in positive ways.
Frameworks for Policy Analysis argues that, in order to bring relevance back to policy analysis, we need to approach policy situations as complex phenomena and employ multiple ways of looking at things in order to understand the essential elements of each policy case. The book is an exploration of distinct, sometimes radically different, models for analysis, but it is also a reference for these multiple methodologies that all come under the term "analysis." Along with classic and recent models, the book introduces some new concepts that serve to deepen our analysis and aspire to what Geertz calls "thick description." This text, written for advanced courses in policy analysis, is an answer to the critical gap between the complexity and dimensionality of policy situations and the abstract and formal character of policy analysis, in general. The book begins by introducing the reader to dominant models of analysis, pointing out their limitations and the potential for transcending these limits. It also introduces new analytical approaches that help to merge text and context, increasing the dimensionality and authenticity of the analysis.