Deborah Rigling Gallagher

ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP: A REFERENCE HANDBOOK

Volume II focuses on examples of environmental problem solving. We seek essays that focus on how leadership addresses specific problems, offering analysis and advice. We hope that scholars in the environmental science and management community will wish to explore the idea of leadership in specific problem contexts. The sections include: Taking Action in the Face of Scientific Uncertainty (e.g., mitigating climate change impacts, preventing the spread of invasive species) Promoting International Cooperation in the Face of Conflicting Agendas (e.g., reconciling species protection and free trade, addressing global overpopulation) Addressing Conflicts between Economic Progress and Environmental Protection (e.g., valuing ecosystem services, designing transit oriented development, confronting agricultural water use) Addressing Environmental Injustices (e.g., reducing environmental health risks, analyzing socioeconomic factors)

Promoting community involvement at brownfields sites in socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods

Brownfields programmes provide environmental justice to distressed communities by applying private sector remediation and real estate expertise to abandoned and contaminated properties. This study examines how brownfields developers and community support organisations operating in socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods work to increase awareness of projects in the community, build trust between stakeholders and create mechanisms for community members to participate in brownfields decision making. Analysis of case study data from brownfields sites in four US cities shows that developers and non-governmental organisations can play important roles in fashioning redevelopment outcomes which benefit both developers and communities. When standard required outreach efforts are combined with non-traditional community involvement mechanisms, the result is often long-term support for redevelopment projects.

Advocates for environmental justice: the role of the champion in public participation implementation

That segment of the community I would say is just in general pretty disenfranchised. We found that if you want participation you have to go to them. I mean there are days when you just need to go knock on the door. Brownfields developer in a poor urban neighbourhood This article considers the role that champions play as advocates for socioeconomically disadvantaged community member involvement in environmental management decision-making. Six case studies of brownfields redevelopment projects located in poor urban neighbourhoods are examined. Analysis of these case studies reveals how champion behaviour, which has typically been studied only in the context of technological innovation, is enacted in public participation efforts in the service of environmental justice. The study finds that champions who emerge in these settings lead the development and implementation of non-standard public participation process innovations.

A Story About People and Porpoises: Consensus-Based Decision Making in the Shadow of Political Action.

Professionally facilitated multi-stakeholder meetings of marine mammal Take Reduction Teams, such as the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team, are mandated by the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972. These meetings employ consensus-based decision-making to create policies to safeguard marine mammals. This opportunistic case study examines the history of the Harbor Porpoise Take Reduction Team multi-stakeholder group, and policy decisions the team made to address harmful interactions between harbor porpoises and the New England and mid-Atlantic groundfish fishery. For more than a decade, stakeholders regularly met to create regulations designed to mitigate the accidental entanglement of harbor porpoises in gillnets, called bycatch. A series of disruptions, including a new political appointee and the addition of new team members, altered how stakeholders interacted with one another and how regulations were implemented. These shocks to the formerly well-functioning team, placed the future of consensus-based policy creation at risk. Lessons from this case study can be applied to increase understanding of how multi-stakeholder methods, which are incorporated into many regulatory decision-making processes operate in practice and illustrate the fragile nature of long-standing consensus.

The Professionalization of Sustainability

Businesses are increasingly called on to incorporate considerations of environmental and social sustainability into strategic operations, along with the economic aspects of their operations. They are asked by customers, employees and other stakeholders to move firm practices from a focus on profitability, short-term compliance and eco-efficiency to consider the long-term social and environmental impacts of operations. They respond to demands that products and services have minimal impacts on the environment and promote social equity, and showcase sustainability reports on their websites. Firms have been encouraged to develop ecoenterprise strategies (Stead and Stead, 2000), strategic management tools that enable firms to ‘stand for sustainability’ by incorporating a ‘sustainability-centered values network’. Understandably, the development of such a sustainability-centered network necessarily depends on organizational members coming together to share and apply knowledge of sustainability grounded in their individual professional training and identification. Early research (Wilensky, 1964; Hall, 1968) focused on standard organizational forms and processes, but presaged a professionalization process in which the outcome might be a network form. This chapter considers that process in detail. This study focuses on the process of creating a shared professional identity based on sustainability, which we term the professionalization of sustainability. It considers how firm members, working together across professional disciplines, join their knowledge and values to create a new professional identity centered on sustainability. It uses a single case-study of a multidisciplinary real estate firm to evaluate how, in the cross-disciplinary setting of brownfield redevelopment, the emergent views and underlying professional values of knowledge workers, such as planners, lawyers, financial analysts and engineers, may combine to affect sustainable redevelopment outcomes. The study considers how multidisciplinary teams of brownfield professionals develop common language, professional norms, values and identities in the context of sustainability. It asks what