Julia Affolderbach

Private or self-regulation? A comparative study of forest certification choices in Canada, the United States and Germany

Forest certification is perhaps the best example of a voluntary governance structure for addressing environmental spillovers. Competing forest certification schemes have evolved. At the global level, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 14001 certification and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification focus on environmental processes and sustainable management of forestland, respectively. Regional/domestic schemes have been started by industry and/or landowners to compete with the FSC system. The main difference between FSC certification and the others is that the FSC relies on regulation by a non-state private regulator, while the others employ a form of self-regulation. In this study, survey data from firms in Canada, the United States and Germany are used to investigate factors that cause firms to prefer and/or choose a particular certification scheme. The findings indicate that market access is an important reason why forest firms certify, but it is an insufficient reason for them to pick the FSC system despite opinion polls that reveal a preference for FSC-style certification. Rather, firms prefer (participate in) FSC certification because they perceive it to confer environmental benefits, while those choosing another certification scheme do so on economic grounds. Finally, as companies become increasingly aware of their certification options, they are less likely to pursue FSC certification.

Environmental Bargains: Power Struggles and Decision Making over British Columbia’s and Tasmania’s Old-Growth Forests

abstract Over the past few decades, conflicts over resources have increased in scale and intensity. They are frequently dominated by environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) that fight, boycott, lobby, and negotiate with other interest groups to privilege nonindustrial, particularly environmental, values of resources. This article proposes an environmental bargaining framework to analyze the many and varied forms of interactions and processes through which ENGOs seek to change existing practices and decision structures. Drawing on political economy and political ecology approaches, environmental bargaining recognizes the importance of multiple perspectives, strategies of actors, and the regional context. Conceptually, the article interprets environmental conflicts along two dimensions: the distribution of power between actors and forms of interaction ranging from confrontational to collaborative. Examples from British Columbia, Canada, and Tasmania, Australia, reveal the value of comparative perspectives and the importance of the regional context that determines behavior and relationships between actors. While confrontational action has brought considerable change to Tasmania’s forests, the example from British Columbia suggests that collaborative forms of decision making that are based on a balance of power have more potential to protect environmental values and bring peace to the woods.

Mobile transitions: Exploring synergies for urban sustainability research

Urban sustainability approaches focusing on a wide range of topics such as infrastructure and mobility, green construction and neighbourhood planning, or urban nature and green amenities have attracted scholarly interest for over three decades. Recent debates on the role of cities in climate change mitigation have triggered new attempts to conceptually and methodologically grasp the cross-sectorial and cross-level interplay of enrolled actors. Within these debates, urban and economic geographers have increasingly adopted co-evolutionary approaches such as the social studies of technology (SST or ‘transition studies’). Their plea for more spatial sensitivity of the transition approach has led to promising proposals to adapt geographic perspectives to case studies on urban sustainability. This paper advocates engagement with recent work in urban studies, specifically policy mobility, to explore conceptual and methodological synergies. It emphasises four strengths of an integrated approach: (1) a broadened understanding of innovations that emphasises not only processes of knowledge generation but also of knowledge transfer through (2) processes of learning, adaptation and mutation, (3) a relational understanding of the origin and dissemination of innovations focused on the complex nature of cities and (4) the importance of individual actors as agents of change and analytical scale that highlights social processes of innovation. The notion of urban assemblages further allows the operationalisation of both the relational embeddedness of local policies as well as their cross-sectoral actor constellations.

Environmental Bargaining and Boundary Organizations: Remapping British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest

In recent decades, the creation of conservation areas has been a significant and contested trend in resource peripheries around the globe, embracing the “remapping” of resource extents, tenures, and values and thereby land use patterns and regional development trajectories. Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have emerged as key actors in the conflicts underlying this remapping, as advocates of environmental values and opponents of vested economic and political interests engaged in large-scale resource commodification. Remapping is contentious because it is inescapably normative, rendering moral judgments and alterations of property rights and the meaning of sustainable development. The outcomes of remapping are highly contingent, driven by environmental bargaining processes that describe the formal and informal interactions among ENGOs, industrial interests, different levels of government, and other actors with conflicting interests, strategies, and alliances. This article explores how conflicts were resolved in the creation of the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbias central coast. Conceptually, the stakeholder model approach to resource conflict is elaborated by emphasizing the roles of ENGOs as advocates and representatives of environmental values within scientific boundary organizations created specifically to be key facilitators in the bargaining process. The study draws on forest policy documents, records of negotiation, surveys of the regions ecological and socioeconomic structures, and field visits. The analysis reveals the Coast Information Team as the multirepresentative scientific boundary organization that developed a shared, accepted multilayered geographic information system of the region. This map provided a “shared currency” and the basis for agreement regarding (1) land use zoning at multiple scales, (2) ecosystem-based management, and (3) conservation mapping.

Environmental bargaining: Power struggles and decision-making over Tasmania and British Columbia's old-growth forests

abstract Over the past few decades, conflicts over resources have increased in scale and intensity. They are frequently dominated by environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) that fight, boycott, lobby, and negotiate with other interest groups to privilege nonindustrial, particularly environmental, values of resources. This article proposes an environmental bargaining framework to analyze the many and varied forms of interactions and processes through which ENGOs seek to change existing practices and decision structures. Drawing on political economy and political ecology approaches, environmental bargaining recognizes the importance of multiple perspectives, strategies of actors, and the regional context. Conceptually, the article interprets environmental conflicts along two dimensions: the distribution of power between actors and forms of interaction ranging from confrontational to collaborative. Examples from British Columbia, Canada, and Tasmania, Australia, reveal the value of comparative perspectives and the importance of the regional context that determines behavior and relationships between actors. While confrontational action has brought considerable change to Tasmania’s forests, the example from British Columbia suggests that collaborative forms of decision making that are based on a balance of power have more potential to protect environmental values and bring peace to the woods.

Blending Scales of Governance: Land‐Use Policies and Practices in the Small State of Luxembourg

Affolderbach J. and Carr C. Blending scales of governance: land-use policies and practices in the small state of Luxembourg, Regional Studies. While multilevel governance is helpful in understanding the logics behind integrated sustainable development policies, this paper argues that relational multi-scalar approaches more accurately explain actual land-use transformations in the small state of Luxembourg. These conclusions are based on surveys of planning policies and observations of land-use patterns related to housing and retail. Additionally, over 60 interviews were performed with local actors. The results reveal how actors blend scales of governance to override national directives to exert changes in land use. Blending scales is not always strategic or advantageous, but is an unavoidable process that characterizes interactions in a small state.

Interactive Knowledge Generation in Urban Green Building Transitions

Knowledge coproduction between practitioners and scientists offers promising opportunities for the emerging research field of the geography of sustainability transitions. Drawing on experiences from an international research project on urban green building transitions, this article explores the potentials and challenges of interactive and collaborative knowledge generation methods in understanding sustainability transitions. Our results show that ongoing engagement with local experts and practitioners through interactive World Café workshops and follow-up exchanges allows for a better understanding of the research context and knowledge exchange to all participants involved in the research process.

Rescaling sustainability? Local opportunities and scalar contradictions

We need a better world: That’s the goal, in fact. At a time when sociopolitical environmental problems seem overwhelming in magnitude and ever increasing in severity, this objective can hardly be overstated. As the urban and local scale have often been postulated as most appropriate site of intervention to respond to sustainability problems, this journal aims to bring into conversation how local practices can contribute to wider sustainability transitions in ways that higher levels of authority cannot, and further, to provide a platform for research that understands the necessity of justice and equality among ourselves as a prerequisite for sustainability (Agyeman and Evans 2012). The papers presented in this Special Issue show that there is still some way to go in achieving these goals, highlighting the scalar opportunities and limitations to current emerging sustainability endeavours. Along with an upcoming Special Issue of Regional Studies edited by Gibbs and Lintz (currently in review), this issue is the result of a series of scholarly venues. The first was a series of workshops organised by the Regional Studies Association (2013) Research Network on Ecological Regional Development, where researchers met to explore regional environmental constraints and opportunities, and to identify key research fields and points of orientation for research (Affolderbach et al. 2013). Second was the series of sessions on urban sustainability at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, in New York (Carr et al. 2012). Together, these venues brought together a strong cohort of scholars and expertise that addressed and analysed the role of actor constellations, associated patterns of governance, and respective spatial dimensions in sustainability transitions. While a rich diversity of initiatives were brought to light at these conferences – and some of that variety will be exposed here as well – what also came out of these meetings was the recognition that local initiatives must be viewed in association to the wider multi-scalar contexts that enable them. What we present here are a series of papers that, together, offer conceptually anchored critical case studies that expose the potential, but also limited reach of, networks, the spatial unevenness, and social externalities that unfold and diverge at wider scales of analysis. This collection of papers thus underscores the need to think beyond Born and Purcell’s (2006) “local trap”, which refers to the faulty assumption that the local scale is inherently better and more just than a national-scale or global-scale, and that, for this reason, the local is always more desirable and preferable to larger scales. By getting beyond this trap, the object is not to refute any good intentions, but to refocus the lens away from proclaimed local triumphs and the plethora of good ideas that are surfacing in local contexts towards the multi-scalar relations that embed, support, and define them. Cross-cutting all of these papers is the notion of place as the site of intervention and locus of change: Ideas emerge and are transformed in spatial arrangements bound to local places. However,

“Just” ecopreneurs: re-conceptualising green transitions and entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT Economic, environmental, and social limits of the current capitalist mode of production have led to a rethinking and reconceptualisation of economic processes and models including the role of businesses in sustainable development. While green economies and more specifically green entrepreneurs have been identified as agents of change that can challenge the mainstream and seek to induce environmental, social, and ethical transformation of society, much research has stayed within existing models of thinking predominantly rooted in technocratic approaches (e.g. ecological modernisation and more recently transition studies). This paper seeks to offer an alternative understanding of green entrepreneurship that breaks open these discussions using an environmental justice frame that focuses on the role of extra-economic discourses in shaping the social relations of economic systems. By drawing on an exemplary case study of “just” entrepreneurship from Boston, Massachusetts, USA, the paper seeks to start a conversation around the ideas of green entrepreneurship and environmental justice as vehicles to deliver potentially broader system changes and explores both conceptual and practical aspects of green development. As such, it offers (1) evidence of a just green economy that can be realised within existing capitalist structures as well as (2) a different conceptual entry point to understanding green entrepreneurship.

Vancouver: leading green building transitions?

Vancouver has been widely promoted and recognised as a green city, as reflected in a number of awards and international rankings. This chapter analyses the trajectory of greening with specific reference to green building in Vancouver. It identifies three examples of green building: (1) the University of British Columbia as birthplace of more radical thinking in terms of sustainability, (2) the Olympic Village in Southeast False Creek as green model neighbourhood and (3) Vancouver’s Greenest City 2020 Action Plan as policy strategy to promote green building. Based on these three examples, the chapter highlights the interplay of local and global influences on green building transitions and critically investigates the impacts of these on the city. Reduced carbon emissions and improved quality of life are central to green building transitions in Vancouver, but neoliberal and entrepreneurial objectives together with a shift towards quantified approaches of greening are challenging the former. While leadership is omnipresent in representations and narratives of Vancouver as a green city, greening strategies largely fall into what is commonly considered as incremental and predictable, rather than radical change, thus adding a question mark to leadership claims.