Marko Joas

Governing sustainable cities

Based upon a 3 year research project funded by the European Commission’s FP5 programme (DISCUS EVK4-CT-2001-00065), this book reports on the results of a study of local sustainable development processes and outcomes in 40 cities across Europe. It has been widely quoted and has considerable significance for practice, policy and research. Evans has been invited to speak to its themes and conclusions in the USA, Japan, China. South Africa, and in many European countries.

Multi-level Environmental Governance: a concept under stress?

The past decade has witnessed a change in the world order of environmental policy making. The strongholds of national environmental policy competence gave room for international regimes beginning in the 1980s, a development that reached a peak during the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Since then the direction of governance patterns has partly been reversed. However, the trend is not back towards nation states, but towards sub-national units that are reforming environmental governance patterns directly with supra-national units, such as the EU, with nation states, with interand non-governmental organisations as well as with other sub-national governments. Additionally, increased networking across public and private actors and shifting responsibilities from the public to the private sector has emerged, leading to new forms of environmental governance regardless of formal hierarchies. This development is especially evident in the Baltic area, including the Nordic countries. The papers in this special issue of Local Environment aim at analysing this development. This editorial will review some of the literature in the field of multi-level governance, with a special focus on that which has earlier appeared in Local Environment. There will also be a brief comment on the way those issues were discussed in a workshop on Multi-level Environmental Governance at the 6th Nordic Conference on Environmental Social Sciences in June 2003 from which the papers in this issue originate.

New approaches to managing protected areas in the Nordic countries

The five Nordic countries cover a vast area, 1.2 million square kilometres, not including Greenland and the Spitsbergen archipelago (Nordic Council of Ministers 2007), as much as Germany, France and Italy put together. With a population of only 25 million, the region has one of the lowest population densities in the world. Climate and soil quality determine how land is used. In Denmark, the most densely populated of the five, there are hardly any untouched natural areas left. Most of the scarce forest is concentrated in plantations, and around two-thirds of Denmark’s total area is farmed or given over to gardens and parks. In contrast, less than 10% of the land in the other Nordic countries is cultivated (Nordic Council of Ministers 2007). The first natural parks in Europewere established in 1909, when Sweden set up nine parks. By 2006 around 11.5% of Sweden was protected for nature conservation purposes, with 28 national parks and 2700 nature reserves (Norden 2006). Nature conservation entered the Finnish legal code in 1923. Today, around 10% of Finland is protected by law, in the form of 35 national parks, 19 large-scale, strictly managed nature reserves and close to 500 other nature reserves (see Statistics Finland 2006, see also http://www.metsa.fi). Norway’s first national park dates back to 1962. As of writing, Norway has 29 national parks and more than 2000 other protected areas of various sizes, either as (strictly managed) nature reserves or (less strictly managed) protected landscape areas (www.dirnat.no/ verneomrader, 15 September 2008). By 2007 14.3% of mainland Norway (i.e. not including Spitsbergen archipelago) was protected by the Nature Conservation Act (St. meld. no. 26 2006–2007). Denmark’s first nature protection law came into force in 1917 (Norden 2006), giving the country a long tradition of nature protection. However, it was only recently that Denmark got its first national park. Finally, 8.5% of Icelandic land is protected (Norden 2006). The Nordic countries share a long history of nature conservation, and compared with most other countries, the areas protected amount to a significant proportion. Nature conservation has traditionally been a central government responsibility in the Nordic countries. Protected areas and regulations were drawn up by state agencies within the scope of national and/or international conservation objectives. These decisions were based on scientific inquiries. However, as the four Nordic case studies presented in this issue show, changes are being made to this hierarchical mode of governing. Each case study has its own rationale and purpose. Put head to tail, two trends in the management of protected areas stand out:

Concluding Remarks: Regulatory Gaps and Broader Governance Patterns in the Baltic Sea

The concluding chapter summarizes the findings on the book and makes a series of conclusions relating to jurisdictional matters as well as the substantive topics covered. It is noted that several regulatory gaps still exist in the regulation of the environment in the Baltic Sea and seeks to use the sample of issues discussed in the book for making some more general observations on the development, nature and consequences of various types of gaps in the specific Baltic Sea context.