Christine Overdevest

Road building, land use and climate change: prospects for environmental governance in the Amazon

Some coupled land–climate models predict a dieback of Amazon forest during the twenty-first century due to climate change, but human land use in the region has already reduced the forest cover. The causation behind land use is complex, and includes economic, institutional, political and demographic factors. Pre-eminent among these factors is road building, which facilitates human access to natural resources that beget forest fragmentation. While official government road projects have received considerable attention, unofficial road building by interest groups is expanding more rapidly, especially where official roads are being paved, yielding highly fragmented forest mosaics. Effective governance of natural resources in the Amazon requires a combination of state oversight and community participation in a ‘hybrid’ model of governance. The MAP Initiative in the southwestern Amazon provides an example of an innovative hybrid approach to environmental governance. It embodies a polycentric structure that includes government agencies, NGOs, universities and communities in a planning process that links scientific data to public deliberations in order to mitigate the effects of new infrastructure and climate change.

Forest dependence and community well-being: a segmented market approach

Forestry activities, such as timber production and processing, are important economic activities in many rural communities. Yet the research on the relationship between forest dependence and community economic well‐being is inconclusive. This article examines the relationship between forest dependence and county per capita income and poverty in rural Georgia. Forest dependence is conceptualized according to Averitts theory of the dual economy. Core dependence, in other words, dependence on well‐capitalized, pulp and paper firms, is expected to affect county‐level economic well‐being differently than dependence on periphery forest industry or high timberland concentrations. Regression analyses show that core forest industries are positively related to county per capita income, while periphery industries have no significant effect and timberland concentration is negatively related to per capita income and positively related to the poverty rate.

Unofficial road building in the Brazilian Amazon: dilemmas and models for road governance

Unofficial roads form dense networks in landscapes, generating a litany of negative ecological outcomes, but in frontier areas they are also instrumental in local livelihoods and community development. This trade-off poses dilemmas for the governance of unofficial roads. Unofficial road building in frontier areas of the Brazilian Amazon illustrates the challenges of ‘road governance.’ Both state-based and community-based governance models exhibit important liabilities for governing unofficial roads. Whereas state-based governance has experienced difficulties in adapting to specific local contexts and interacting effectively with local peoples, community-based governance has a mixed record owing to social inequalities and conflicts among local interest groups. A state-community hybrid model may offer more effective governance of unofficial road building by combining the oversight capacity of the state with locally-grounded community management via participatory decision-making.

A test of the Environmental Kuznets Curve using long-term watershed inputs

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) postulates that environmental quality is initially degraded with increasing economic prosperity, until reaching some turn- ing point where environmental quality improves with increases in wealth. Tests using environmental indicators beyond those that affect human health have been less supportive of the EKC idea. We hypothesize that environmental changes impacting human health are more likely to show evidence of an EKC than variables less directly related to human health. Furthermore, the EKC hypothesis assumes that ecological damage is reversible, and we argue that this assumption is not always valid. We test for evidence of an EKC in Dane County, Wisconsin, using non-point-source pollution time series data for Lake Mendota throughout the 20th century. We examine metals deposited in lake sediments (cadmium, chromium, copper, and lead), other non-point-source pollutants such as sulfur and dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP), and water clarity (measured by Secchi disk depth). We relate changes in ecological variables to changes in real wealth per capita (RWPC) in Dane County over time. The EKC did not describe the relationship between all ecological and economic indicators tested; however, several variables were related to RWPC. Our strongest results (for Secchi depth, DRP, and copper) show increasing pollution with increasing wealth. Secchi depth and DRP are related to water quality and clarity, which have value to society but less direct, immediate health consequences. P pollution may also be fairly irreversible over short time scales. The best models and plots for cadmium, chromium, and lead suggest improvements in environmental quality with increases in RWPC, although these trends were not statistically significant. Results for sulfur were inconclusive. Overall, wealth did not explain much of the variability in any of the ecological variables examined here, suggesting that consideration of additional factors are necessary to explain their dynamics. Economic prosperity cannot be expected to improve all aspects of the environment, but may be biased toward aspects that are ecologically reversible phenomena or of concern to human health.

The Experimental Turn in Environmental Sociology: Pragmatism and New Forms of Governance

Drawing from American pragmatist thinking this chapter knits together European and North American approaches on decision making under conditions of ignorance and uncertainty. By doing so, the chapter develops an experimentalist policy logic based on the writings of early pragmatists as well as the Chicago School of sociology to exemplify an example of experimental governance and strategies for continuously coping with ignorance in the remediation of areas with multiple contaminant sources and plumes related to industrial activities in the former socialist east of Germany. Finally, the chapter fathoms further possibilities and limits of an experimental approach in environmental sociology.

Expert stakeholder attitudes and support for alternative water sources in a groundwater depleted region

The main objectives of this research were to quantify the risks/benefits and impacts of alternative water sources (AWSs) as perceived by expert stakeholders and to evaluate the overall support for multiple AWSs by expert stakeholders. The St. Johns River (SJR) basin, FL, USA was chosen as a case study for AWSs because it is a fresh groundwater depleted region and there are ongoing activities related to water supply planning. Expert stakeholders included federal, state, and local governments, public utilities, consulting engineering and industry, and environmental and social non-governmental organizations. AWSs under consideration in the SJR basin include surface water, desalination, water reclamation, and water conservation. A two-phase research approach was followed that focused on expert stakeholders. First, an elicitation study was used to identify salient beliefs about AWSs. Open-ended questions were asked about the risks/benefits of AWSs in terms of the three pillars of sustainability: ecological, economic, and human health impacts. Second, an online survey was constructed using beliefs identified during the elicitation study. The online survey was used to quantify attitudes toward and overall support for AWSs. The salient beliefs of expert stakeholders were dominated by the ecological pillar of sustainability. The support of expert stakeholders for AWSs, from least favorable to most favorable, was surface water withdrawals<desalination<water reclamation<water conservation, and was shaped by attitudes. The results of this research provide an improved understanding of the beliefs and attitudes that influence decision-makers involved in water supply planning.

Using “Cultural Cognition” to Predict Environmental Risk Perceptions in a Florida Water-Supply Planning Process

There have been important recent advances in cultural cognition theory, a theory of the cultural rootedness of risk perception. However, to date, research on cultural cognition has focused only on general public samples, not participants in stakeholder planning processes. Using original data from a survey of stakeholders in a water-supply planning process in Florida, this article evaluates the efficacy and role of cultural cognition theory compared to other social antecedents of risk perception often used in sociological studies, including the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) and organizational affiliation. The article (1) increases empirical understanding of the predictive utility of cultural cognition among resource management stakeholders; (2) evaluates cultural cognitions direct and indirect effects on risk perception; and (3) discusses implications for the management of stakeholder processes.

Future directions for applications of political economy in environmental and resource sociology: selected research priorities going forward

ABSTRACT Environmental and resource sociology has long featured political economy perspectives among its diverse theoretical retinue. Whether based on treadmills, modernization or other frameworks, political economy perspectives have influenced a growing body of environmental and resource sociology research. Recent reviews of environmental and resource sociology offer broad evaluations of the evolving state of the field, highlighting political economy theories and research needs. In this paper, we complement those reviews by suggesting a selection of specific topics informed in various ways by political economy perspectives as future directions in environmental and resource sociology. We prioritize research questions as applications of political economy perspectives to additional issues, sometimes via cross-fertilizations with other theoretical approaches, and thereby offer innovative directions for future research. The four topics are (1) food justice, critical animal studies and the industrial food system; (2) green criminology; (3) social media, social movements and environmental change; and (4) performativity. For each topic, we overview foundational arguments, noting relationships to political economy thought and briefly reviewing recent empirical work, before proposing specific research questions to inform future inquiry. While other topics are indeed valuable, we suggest that the assets of those we feature offer particularly innovative and fruitful directions. We conclude by discussing other research topics that also present intriguing opportunities.