Governing by expertise: the contested politics of (accounting for) land-based mitigation in a new climate agreement

This article analyzes the contested politics of including (and accounting for) land-based mitigation in a post-2020 climate agreement. Emissions from land have been only partially included to date within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015 and “applicable to all” for the post-2020 period, raises the possibility of unprecedented reliance on land-based mitigation. This has significant consequences for furthering both ambition and equity in global climate mitigation efforts. Yet, what are these consequences, and how have they manifested themselves in the existing (pre-2020) multilateral climate regime? What role do accounting rules for land-based mitigation play herein? In addressing these questions, we identify key dimensions of what we term the “governance by expertise” approach taken to land-based mitigation to date, which has served to reduce the environmental integrity of existing (developed country) mitigation efforts. Specifically, we analyze land-use accounting rules as a site of politics and highlight the “technicalization of politics” underway in this realm, which obscures the political implications of how land has been included to date. We conclude by considering whether the Paris Agreement institutionalizes similar dynamics, and the environmental integrity and equity implications of doing so.     

Access and allocation in earth system governance: water and climate change compared

A significant percentage of the global population does not yet have access to safe drinking water, sufficient food or energy to live in dignity. There is a continuous struggle to allocate the earth’s resources among users and uses. This article argues that distributional problems have two faces: access to basic resources or ecospace; and, the allocation of environmental resources, risks, burdens, and responsibilities for causing problems. Furthermore, addressing problems of access and allocation often requires access to social processes (science, movements and law). Analysts, however, have tended to take a narrow, disciplinary approach although an integrated conceptual approach may yield better answers. This article proposes a multi-disciplinary perspective to the problem of access and allocation and illustrates its application to water management and climate change.     

Evoking equity as a rationale for solar geoengineering research? Scrutinizing emerging expert visions of equity

This paper examines how notions of equity are being evoked by expert advocates of more research into solar geoengineering. We trace how specific understandings of equity figure centrally—although not always explicitly—in these expert visions. We find that understandings of equity in such “vanguard visions” are narrowly conceived as epistemic challenges, answerable by (more) scientific analysis. Major concerns about equity are treated as empirical matters, requiring scientific assessment of feasibility, risks, or “win–win” distributive outcomes and optimizations, with concurrent calls to delimit risk or reduce scientific uncertainties. We argue that such epistemic framings sidestep, inter alia, the inequality in resources available to diverse non-experts—including the “vulnerable” evoked in expert visions—to project their own equity perspectives onto imagined technological pathways of the future. These may include concerns relating to moral or historical responsibility and/or lack of agency in shaping the directions of innovation. We conclude that the performative power and political implications of specific expert visions of equity, evoked as a rationale to undertake solar geoengineering research, require continued scrutiny.     

Privatizing Environmental Resources: The Need for Supervision of Clean Development Mechanism Contracts?

This article argues that a current trend in global sustainable development governance is actively to engage the private sector in participating in the process of implementing global and national policy goals. This trend is based on the notion that the private sector has the ideas, technologies and resources at its disposal that can be channelled to addressing global environmental challenges. This new trend does not, however, take into account the past and present implications of private sector investment in fields such as mining and forestry. Nor does it closely examine how private sector rules will subsequently infiltrate and govern environmental management. On the basis of an examination of current policy developments and contracts in the area of environmental management and their implications for developing countries, this article argues in favour of establishing an authority that oversees the legitimacy and legality of these new contracts, especially in, but not limited to, the area of climate change.     

Determination of length of human upper limb long bones from their fragments

It is impossible to measure directly the length of fragmentary or broken long bones. It is in order to calculate the height (stature) of the individual, using magnification factors. An attempt has been made to devise a method of calculating the length from such fragments for the three long bones of the upper limb.     

State–Community Synergies in Community-Driven Development

States can do much to tap community-level energies and resources for development if they seek to interact more synergistically with local communities. The broader spin-off is the creation of a developmental society and polity. Using case studies from Asia and Latin America, we illustrate how: (1) state efforts to bring about land reform, tenancy reform, and expanding non-crop sources of income can broaden the distribution of power in rural communities, laying the basis for more effective community-driven collective action; and (2) higher levels of government can form alliances with communities, putting pressure on local authorities from above and below to improve development outcomes at the local level. These alliances can also be very effective in catalysing collective action at community level, and reducing ‘local capture’ by vested interests. There are several encouraging points that emerge from these case studies. First, powerful institutional changes do not necessarily take long to generate. Second, they can be achieved in a diversity of settings: tightly knit or open communities; war-ravaged or relatively stable; democratic or authoritarian; with land reform or (if carefully managed) even without. Third, there are strong political pay-offs in terms of legitimacy and popular support for those who support such developmental action.