T O'Riordan

Research Policy and Review 6. Future Directions for Environmental Policy

Environmentalism is an elusive concept with many meanings. In this paper its changing character is examined together with an analysis of how it is likely to influence public policy across a broad front. The major environmental issues which OECD countries are likely to face nationally, regionally, and globally over the next twenty years are reviewed and the type of politics that may emerge within the new environmentalism is discussed. The overriding global issues will be the tragic interconnection between poverty and environmental damage in the underdeveloped countries. In the developed but deindustrialising economies of the ‘North’, greatest attention will be placed on devising means for creating jobs and providing satisfying occupations for people forced out of a job or never in employment. Environmental rehabilitation can create jobs, but it will involve the denial of resources otherwise available to create jobs elsewhere. It will therefore be necessary to consider the ‘next job effectiveness’ of environmental policies. Another policy area that requires new thinking is the management of environmental hazards, notably how to dispose of toxic wastes in a manner acceptable to a majority of people. Finally, serious efforts will have to be made, not only to infuse environmental principles within all policy arenas, but also to ensure that departmental responsibilities and budgets are properly linked. The principle that those who exploit environmental resources should, by means of transfer taxes and payments, subsidise those who use environmental resources frugally and benignly should also become established.

Ecological Studies and Political Decisions

Resource management is a process of striking a balance between improving the well-being of people and causing undesirable environmental change. Politicians are responsible for making the appropriate decisions, but they are increasingly influenced by the advice of professionals, especially planners, ecologists, and administrators (budgeting officials, legal experts, personnel managers). This paper looks at the resource-management process as it operates in the Norfolk Broads region of England. It illustrates how different parties involved in using and managing the area disagree about what precisely are the causes of environmental deterioration and thus about suitable courses of action. Within this context the trained ecologist may find it difficult to maintain a stance of detached objectivity. The author recommends that ecologists become more familiar with the wider social and institutional aspects of resource management and that they play a more active role in informing people of the consequences of various courses of action.

Reviews: Statistical Demography, Geography of Elections, Landscape Economics, Office Location and Public Policy, the Structure of Scientific Theories, the Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change, Accessibility: The Rural Challenge

This little book represents a concise introduction to some of the fundamental concepts and statistical techniques used in demographic analysis, and is designed for those making their first acquaintance with the subject. The original version, which was published in France by Presses Universitaires de France in 1972 under the title of Demographie> Statistique, has subsequently been translated and adapted for the English-speaking world. The early chapters contain a description of the components of population change, the construction and interpretation of population pyramids, and the analysis of population structure, with particular emphasis on the explanation of different concepts of age. Most of the examples that are chosen illustrate demographic characteristics at the national scale and it is evident that considerable attention has been directed towards adaptation of the text so that statistics for England and Wales, as well as those for France, can be utilised. Analysis of British data, however, is restricted by the absence of a double classification of the population by age and by cohort of birth. This, while cohort analysis is applicable in the French case, period analysis is appropriate for British statistics. The implication of this important distinction between the two types of information is explained, with the use of Lexis diagrams, in the definition of cohort and period age-specific mortality rates, and recurs in the context of the construction of life tables and in the definition of fertility rates. The author has tended to avoid digressions whenever possible and, although this is advantageous in that the text remains compact, explanation seems restricted to a bare minimum at times and there are more complicated but interesting problems such as the estimation of exact age data from age-group data or vice versa, that have not been addressed. One other general feature of the text which certainly adds to its clarity is the frequent use of simple, but realistic, mathematical examples, and this is particularly helpful when different methods of calculating various measures of mortality and fertility are outlined. Definitions of the basic concepts related to mortality, survival, and fertility provide the central content of the book. In addition to the definition of age-specific death rates, the chapter on mortality includes a description of different ways of calculating infant mortality rates and different methods of comparing mortality levels by using direct or indirect standardisation techniques. The main features and uses of cohort and period life tables are presented in a separate chapter, although many of the problems involved in their construction are not dealt with. Various measures of fertility are reviewed in the chapter that follows, beginning with the crude birth rate and moving on to more sophisticated indexes such as the total fertility rate, the marriage-duration-specific rate and the age-specific legitimate fertility rate. Connections between rates of fertility and reproduction are also examined. Derivation and interpretation of indexes representing other demographic phenomena—nuptiality, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and migration—are contained in an independent chapter and there is a further discussion of population-change rates, reproduction levels, and models of stable and stationary populations but no formal description of aggregate or disaggregated cohort survival models. The text stops well short of matrix algebra. A final chapter in which some practical difficulties involved in constructing histograms for age data, by using semilogarithmic paper and drawing cartograms, has been appended to complete the volume and one noticeable feature about the structure of the book as a whole is the absence of a chapter of introduction to provide the reader at the outset with an indication of what is to follow, and the omission of a chapter of conclusions, to draw together the points of particular significance contained therein. Nevertheless, as an introductory text, it will no doubt prove to be a very useful acquisition for many students.