Ylva Uggla

Transboundary Risk Governance

Governing environmental risk, particularly large-scale transboundary risks associated with climate change and pollution, is one of the most pressing problems facing society.This book focuses on a set of key questions relating to environmental regulation: How are activities regulated in a fragmented world - a world of nation states, regulators, domestic and international law and political contests - and one in which a range of actors, such as governments, corporations and NGOs act in order to influence regulations in specific policy areas? How are complex and trans-boundary environmental issues managed? What role does expert knowledge play in regulating this kind of issues? What give rules authority? In short, how do actors try to render an issue governable?Drawing on regulation theory, discourse theory and science and technology studies, and employing original research, the authors analyse the regulation of four kinds of complex and trans-boundary environmental issues: oil protection in the Baltic Sea, mobile phones and radiation protection, climate change adaptation and genetically modified crops. The outcomes include insights for policymakers, regulators and researchers into how dominant frames are constructed, legitimate actors are configured and authority is established. This in turn exposes the conditions for, and possibility of, developing regulation, making authoritative rules and shaping relevant knowledge in order to govern complex environmental risks.

Making Transboundary Risks Governable: Reducing Complexity, Constructing Spatial Identity, and Ascribing Capabilities

Environmental problems that cross national borders are attracting increasing public and political attention; regulating them involves coordinating the goals and activities of various governments, which often presupposes simplifying and standardizing complex knowledge, and finding ways to manage uncertainty. This article explores how transboundary environmental problems are dealt with to render complex issues governable. By discussing oil pollution in the Baltic Sea and the gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, we elucidate how boundaries are negotiated to make issues governable. Three processes are found to be particularly relevant to how involved actors render complex issues governable: complexity reduction, construction of a spatial identity for an issue, and ascription of capabilities to new or old actor constellations. We conclude that such regulation is always provisional, implying that existing regulation is always open for negotiation and criticism.

Green governmentality and responsibilization: new forms of governance and responses to ‘consumer responsibility’

An extensive literature examines political or green consumption, attending to how people make sense of their consumption relative to norms of individual responsibility and pro-environmental behaviour. Similarly, a small but growing literature addresses green governmentality, focusing on new governance forms and responsibilization processes. These two strands seldom meet, resulting in poor understanding of the links between consumption governance and people’s sense-making and actions relative to the moral imperative of being ‘responsible consumers’. We address this weakness by juxtaposing these two strands of literature, improving our understanding of the processes of responsibilization and some of their consequences. We argue that, to understand the effects of this form of governance, we must realize that subjects are not inevitably positioned and predetermined by a hegemonic discourse. At the same time, we must acknowledge that responsibilization processes give rise to compliance and to a range of ambivalences and forms of resistance.

Strategies to create risk awareness and legitimacy : the Swedish climate campaign

Social means of risk regulation often only arise in response to media attention and public opinion. In contrast, in the case of climate change, the Swedish government proactively launched a public information campaign to promote public awareness and knowledge of the risks associated with climate change, with the explicit objective of promoting acceptance of public means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This paper analyses the framing of climate change in the Swedish climate campaign and its communication strategy. What was the message of the campaign narrative? What did it imply concerning the causes, effects, and management of and responsibility for climate change? What means were used to communicate the risks of climate change? The paper analyses the campaign narrative, its references to various affective images of climate change, and the various storytelling techniques it used. It concludes that the Swedish climate campaign relied on a unidirectional view of risk communication and proffered a narrative containing inconsistencies and ambivalence. The analysis demonstrates that despite a thoroughly worked‐out strategy, a well‐defined message, and the intention to speak clearly, a complex problem such as climate change cannot easily be transformed into a single, coherent story.

Knowledge, power and control—studying environmental regulation in late modernity

Abstract At the same time as increased demands for standardization and control occur within the environmental field, regulation is being confronted by tendencies towards contextualization and fragmentation. This paper examines the question of how these seemingly opposing tendencies can be understood. The aim of this paper is to develop an approach for the study of risk regulation in contemporary society. Four elements are stressed as vital to consider when approaching environmental regulation: (i) the varying roles of science and expertise in regulation; (ii) the decisive role of intentional actors and regulatory organizations; (iii) the decisive but not exclusive role of the nation-state; and (iv) regulation as a process in which knowledge, risk and public concerns are constructed. In conclusion, the paper states that even if regulation is currently dispersed, the concepts of knowledge, power and control are still central to the study of environmental regulation.

The practice of settling and enacting strategic guidelines for climate adaptation in spatial planning: lessons from ten Swedish municipalities

Abstract Spatial planning is increasingly expected to address climate change adaptation. In a Swedish context, this has meant a predominant focus on risks of flooding, erosion and sea-level rise. Gradually, regulatory mechanisms and concrete strategies are evolving to support practical mainstreaming. The aim of this paper was to analyze how frontline planners approach climate change adaptation in an urban context, emphasizing the process of settling and enacting strategic guidelines in spatial planning. The study suggests that municipalities are being preactive, i.e., preparing to act by settling guidelines rather than proactively implementing change when planning for new settlements. Further, the process of accommodating climate risks involves problems. Settling strategic guidelines and determining appropriate levels for what to adapt to are but the start of approaching climate change. Guidelines represent more of an endeavor than settling absolute limits and actually applying the guidelines involves challenges of accessibility and esthetics where the new waterfront limits meets older city structures. Further, guidelines are seen as negotiable since an overarching principle is to maintain flexibility in planning to allow for continued waterfront planning. Pursuing this path is motivated by current demand and previous urban settlement patterns. Also, as future protective measures are needed to secure existing urban areas at risk of flooding and erosion, planners see no use in preventing further waterfront development. Although settling guidelines are important in preparing to act, their practical effectiveness all fall back to how they are actually implemented in daily planning. This leads us to problematize the role of strategic guidelines to secure a climate-proof spatial planning.

The values of biological diversity: a travelogue

Biological diversity is an abstract, scientific concept and both evaluating its condition and, to great extent, justifying its conservation requires expert knowledge. Accordingly, regulating and managing biological diversity presupposes standardisation and methods for managing uncertainty. To be acted on, the concept must be promoted, passing, in this process, through various institutions, such as intergovernmental organisations and national administrations. This paper examines how the principle of biological diversity conservation is defined, focusing on the values of biological diversity and how this notion has ‘travelled the world’. The paper includes a study of how the principle of biological diversity was applied in a specific case of insect control in Sweden.

A reflexive look at reflexivity in environmental sociology

Reflexivity is a central concept in environmental sociology, as in environmental social science in general. The concept is often connected to topics such as modernity, governance, expertise, and consumption. Reflexivity is presented as a means for taking constructive steps towards sustainability as it recognizes complexity, uncertainty, dilemmas, and ambivalence. Critical discussion of the conceptual meaning and usage of reflexivity is therefore needed. Is it a useful theoretical concept for understanding various sustainability issues? Is ‘more reflexivity’ relevant and useful advice that environmental sociologists can give in communicating with other disciplines, policymakers, and practitioners? This article explores the conceptual meaning of reflexivity and assesses its relevance for environmental sociology. In particular, it reviews its usages in three research fields; expertise, governance, and citizen-consumers. The paper furthermore discusses the spatial and temporal boundaries of reflexivity. It concludes by discussing how the concept can be a useful analytical concept in environmental sociology, at the same time as it warns against an exaggerated and unreflexive use of the concept.

The Enrollment of Nature in Tourist Information: Framing Urban Nature as “the Other”

This article is based on the assumption that nature inevitably plays a role in urban place-making. Today, cities worldwide are engaged in place promotion in which nature is constructed as a commodity to consume. This article explores the enrollment of nature in tourist information with a specific analytical focus on the relationship between nature and culture. Guided by framing theory and citing the case of tourist information in Stockholm, the article empirically demonstrates how nature is enrolled in tourist information and turned into a commodity through three distinct but related frames that, in various ways, construct nature as “other”: nature as the familiar other, nature as the exotic other, and pristine nature. The article concludes that the enrollment of nature in city marketing reproduces the modern nature–culture divide, which enables the commodification of nature and helps conceal the environmental consequences of increased urban density.

A sociology of environmental representation

The environment cannot plead its own case but must be represented. The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the concept of representation and demonstrate its relevance for environmental sociology. Drawing on Pitkin’s classic work on representation, we discuss representation as both ‘acting for’ and ‘standing for’. We also make a distinction between actors (representatives) and devices used as representations (e.g. descriptions, graphs and images), while discussing the intertwinement of these two aspects in representative practices. This paper stresses the performativity dimension and social embeddedness of representative practices. It sheds light on different meanings and implications of environmental representation, examining issues of claim-making and what it means to represent the environment in various instances. Given the complex, durable and transboundary character of many topical environmental problems, the paper argues that it is essential to recognize and understand environmental representation in all its variety. It is moreover argued that a sociological elaboration of the concept of representation provides a basis for understanding the conditions for environmental politics, governance, management and action. Environmental sociology can thus be a crucial platform for intriguing new studies on environmental representation.