Mandatory due diligence laws and climate change litigation: Bridging the corporate climate accountability gap?

The debate on corporate climate accountability has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Several countries, particularly in the Global North, have adopted mandatory human rights and/or environmental due diligence legislation. At the same time, judicial and quasi-judicial proceedings are helping to shape the contours of corporate climate accountability. This article considers how litigation against corporations and due diligence legislation interact, and thereby help develop and strengthen corporate climate accountability. While the practice in this area is still limited, there is scope to reflect on early developments and how they may influence both future climate litigation as well as ongoing and future law-making on due diligence. We first review recent developments in climate litigation against corporations, focusing on the extent to which they rely on climate due diligence obligations. We then survey existing and proposed due diligence legislation, examining the extent to which it addresses corporate climate accountability. Finally, we identify scenarios of how due diligence legislation and climate litigation may interact and possibly converge to strengthen corporate climate accountability. We furthermore identify knowledge gaps and areas for further research.     

Pay to protect: Examining the factors of the use of market-based instruments for local water sustainability

Given the myriad of policy instruments aimed at enhancing water quantity conservation available to municipalities, what drives them to opt for a market-based instrument (MBI)? MBIs can be effective and efficient policy instruments to enhance water quantity conservation, but there is little known about why municipalities utilize them. This study hypothesizes that three contextual elements influence a municipality's use of an MBI: the natural, political, and structural environment. The results from two logistic regression models suggest that in a municipality suffering a higher drought level, both a conservative political environment and operating under a council-manager form of government (with the effect more pronounced under a non-council-manager form) will increase the likelihood that it will use an MBI to address water conservation.     

Institutionalization, Sustainability, and Repeatability of ADVANCE for Institutional Transformation

Principal investigators sow the seeds for successful institutionalization and sustainability of their ADVANCE grants when they make the decision to submit the grant and plan the goals, objectives, and activities underpinning the particular aspects of institutional transformation that their university will pursue within a general framework to advance faculty women to senior and leadership positions. Receiving the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding in a very competitive, peer-reviewed program and the relatively large size of the NSF grants carry considerable prestige. It is the institutional investment in terms of both human and capital resources and commitment on the parts of administrators and faculty to establish, change, and implement policies and practices to support ADVANCE that leverages the NSF support and assures long-term impact of the initiative.     

Trading in the secretive commodity

Over the past century and a half, a handful of transnational corporations have built fortunes trading commodity crops such as corn, soy and wheat. Graded and standardized, these commodities are considered uniform and therefore fungible; information about their origins need not accompany them to market. But in recent years major food brands, as part of broader ‘sustainable sourcing’ commitments, have begun to ask about the places and practices that produce these crops. Their inquiries have exposed the limits of the commodity traders’ supposedly unrivalled market intelligence. They also raise questions about how the advent of agricultural grades and standards made knowledge of crop origins seem unnecessary in certain commodity supply chains, and about how those supply chains might henceforth change, now that lack of such knowledge has become a liability.     

Multilevel Governance: Framing the Integration of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Policymaking

Scholars embrace multilevel governance as an analytical framework for complex problems, such as climate change or water pollution. However, the elements needed to comprehensively operationalize multilevel governance remain undefined in the literature. This article describes the five necessary ingredients to a multilevel framework: sanctioning and coordinating authority, provision of capacity, knowledge co-production, framing of co-benefits, and engagement of civil society. The framework’s analytical utility is illustrated through two contrasting case examples—watershed management in the United States and air quality management in China. The framework balances local and central actors, which can promote a more effective governance regime.     

New Governance,Green Planning and Sustainability: Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together1

Bridgman and Davis (2000:91) have argued that ‘ideally government will have a well developed and widely distributed policy framework, setting out economic, social and environmental objectives’. This article compares and evaluates two such frameworks or plans, Tasmania Together and Growing Victoria Together, in terms of their potential to promote sustainability. It argues that they are very different exercises in new governance, aimed at reconnecting with community priorities and at redirecting macro‐policy setting away from a preoccupation with economic priorities, respectively. Nevertheless, both plans have the capacity to ‘green’ state planning, in Tasmania in terms of more purposeful benchmarks, and in Victoria in terms of enhanced sustainability emphasis in the macro‐policy setting. The article encounters tensions in its review of the plans between deliberation and planning, policy empowerment and policy progress, and policy institutionalisation and politicisation as means of achieving policy change. It finds that whilst Tasmania and Victoria are re‐engaged states that are reinventing state policy, as yet they are failing to meet the governance challenges of sustainability.     

论云南文化旅游资源开发

在云南旅游业可持续发展过程中 ,实现经济、文化、生态的协调发展是至关重要的。文化地理学家认为 ,人与自然是相互影响的 ,文化不可能存在于真空中 ,文化对环境影响的同时 ,又通过文化作用于人类 ,对生态系统产生影响。在云南 ,没有离开文化的单纯的生态旅游 ,也没有离开生态的单纯的文化旅游。这样的思路必须贯彻在旅游区特别是一些主题旅游景区的规划建设中。     

Strengthening family planning stewardship with a total market approach: Mali,Uganda, and Kenya experiences

To improve overall market sustainability, governments and their donors are ramping up efforts to strengthen stewardship in developing country health markets. Key stewardship functions include generating intelligence that enable policymakers, ministerial leaders, and program managers to develop evidence‐based policies and strategies to improve the resource management, supply, and use of health products and services. The total market approach (TMA), an analytic and policy framework, generates market intelligence and improves evidence‐based decision‐making, and also strengthens other stewardship functions, such as building and sustaining partnerships, strengthening tools for implementation, aligning government policy with market interventions, and ensuring accountability/transparency. TMA evolved in response to the phase out of donor support for reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP) programs and the need to improve coordination among public, private, nongovernmental organizations, and civil society to achieve greater equity, health impact, and market sustainability. To assess TMA's role in strengthening the stewardship of RH/FP markets, this article reviews three countries that applied TMA principles: Mali, Uganda, and Kenya. It identifies how TMA processes influenced stewardship functions and assesses to what degree these processes have contributed to concrete actions to improve market efficiency and sustainability.     

具有政法高职特色的思想政治教育载体探析——以高校师生服务“全国人大会议”为例

高校思想政治教育要不断探索符合高职院校自身特色的有效载体。高校师生服务"全国人大会议",证明了这是一项符合政法高职特色的思想政治教育载体——社会实践载体。它不仅为传统的思想政治教育课堂教学载体提供了新的思路,也为优化管理服务载体,进一步拓展社会实践载体,并为学院"建首都示范高职院校、创法律实用人才品牌、强服务政法工作能力"开辟了新的道路。