Literature Review

In the age of globalization, marketization, and decentralization of environmental governance, scholarship on private environmental regimes has proliferated over the past decades and greatly influenced the discourse in international environmental politics. This book aims to argue for the benefits of private governance on climate change. As expressed in the title of the book, Beyond Politics, the authors emphasize the emerging conceptual shift of global climate governance, from the traditionally dominant government policy to a new form of governance by the private sector, including corporations, nongovernmental organizations NGOs, and individuals both households and consumers.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is a valuable case study for testing the efficacy of private environmental governance. TVA is not on a trajectory to achieve the decarbonization targets necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The Article concludes that these private governance options are not a panacea, but they have the potential to fill an important gap in public climate governance.

This Article compares two NGOs to show how their different philosophies are both grounded in private environmental governance (PEG) and then reviewing the legal literature about PEG.

Should we cabin democracy to advance environmental protection? It’s a more complicated question than it seems, and this Article will argue the answer is “no.” However, given the direction of some environmental activism and scholarship today, one might think that turning some degree away from democracy is the best option for combating environmental problems.

Abstract: The article examines the ecological and legal component of criminal offenses under martial law, since the risk of man-caused accidents and ecological disasters, which threaten security, including environmental and human ones, as well as international legal order, is increasing owing to aggressor-country army’s deliberate actions. It has been argued that the consequences of the military conflict for the environment, human life and health are already considered catastrophic. It has been proven that the ecological crisis should be recognized as an existential threat to the national security of Ukraine. Pressing issues of forming interdisciplinary (synergistic) connections between environmental and criminal law science and other areas of scientific knowledge have been covered. Considering the outlined problem is becoming of a significant relevance due to the fact that certain criminal offenses cause damage to the environment, thus, leading to its destruction. It is a matter of such criminal offence compositions as laws of the war violation (Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (CCU) and ecocide (Article 441 of the CCU)). The expediency of improving the current criminal legislation and legal liability mechanism, which would satisfy the proportionality requirement, namely commensurate punishment of severity and consequences of the committed acts, has been substantiated. The expediency of further criminal law prohibition of ecocide in the new CCU Draft has been motivated, taking into account the degree of social danger as well as the severity of large-scale and long-term consequences for the environment and the entire humanity. It has been proven that the state’s environmental function to ensure environmental security, fundamental constitutional environmental rights of citizens, as well as to maintain ecological balance and sustainable development on Ukraine’s territory should become today’s narrative, with the environmental security component to be further included into the sectoral state restoration programs in order to form a new environmental law under martial law both for Ukraine and European countries. Based on our own conclusions and generalizations, proposals and recommendations for improving the current national legislation and greening the sectoral national policy components have been provided. It has been argued that legal mechanisms for fixing and determining the amount of environmental damage caused to natural resources and complexes as a result of armed aggression and hostilities under martial law should be established at the legislative level.

World Wide Web technologies create fundamentally new potentials for social interaction and decision-making among diverse social actors. A new generation of Web technologies, accompanied by new political cultures, portends an ushering of radical transformations in democratic decision-making. This chapter asks three critical questions: (1) How do emerging Web technologies deepen democratic participation? (2) How do we avoid or transform scenarios where Web technologies are employed to maintain political-economic oligarchies of power? and (3) What new political cultures or political contracts may emerge through the convergence of Web technology and political engagement? This chapter uses the recent precedent of Liquid Democracy online decision-making experiments in Germany, to answer these questions and peer into the futures of governance. The study came to the following conclusions: (1) We are witnessing a shift from formal representative democracy to situational and fluid forms of governance; (2) Alongside this we are seeing a deepening of political participation, which may bring forth new political cultures and political contracts; and, (3) A number of possible scenarios emerge from the decline of formal representative democracy—A possible “Liquid Revolution” where online governance has transformed democracy; a “Steady-state Oligarchy” where pseudo-representative and oligarchic powers persist; a “Partner State” where representative and online variegated governance is blended; and a “War of the Worlds” where statist and variegated governance online systems aggressively compete for power.

At the root of techno-capitalist development – popularly marketed as “modernity,” “progress” or “development” – is the continuous and systematic processes of natural resource extraction. Reviewing wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany and copper mining in Peru, this article seeks to strengthen the post-liberal or structural approach in genocide studies. These geographically and culturally diverse case studies set the stage for discussions about the complications of conflictual fault lines around extractive development. The central argument is that “green” and conventional natural resource extraction are significant in degrading human and biological diversity, thereby contributing to larger trends of socio-ecological destruction, extinction and the potential for human and nonhuman extermination. It should be acknowledged in the above-mentioned case studies, land control was largely executed through force, notably through “hard” coercive technologies executed by various state and extra-judicial elements, which was complemented by employing diplomatic and “soft” social technologies of pacification. Natural resource extraction is a significant contributor to the genocide-ecocide nexus, leading to three relevant discussion points. First, the need to include nonhuman natures, as well as indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, into genocide studies to dispel an embedded anthropocentrism in the discipline. Second, acknowledges the complications of essentializing identity and the specific socio-cultural values and dispositions that are the targets of techno-capitalist development. Third, that socio-political positionality is essential to how people will relate and identify ecocidal and genocidal processes. Different ontologies, socio-ecological relationships (linked to “the Other”), and radical anti-capitalism are the root targets of techno-capitalist progress, as they seek assimilation and absorption of human and nonhuman “natural resources” into extractive economies. Genocide studies and political ecology – Anthropology, Human Geography and Development Studies – would benefit from greater engagement with each other to highlight the centrality of extractive development in sustaining ecological and climate catastrophe confronting the world today.

This conceptual article presents a comprehensive overview of principles, new urban descriptors and analysis methods that provide relevant ecological information, which can be fully incorporated into the planning process, by connecting ecological perspectives to planning and management issues. Section one summarizes the different notions of ecological urbanism and explores what concepts and basic assumptions can constitute a guide to implement an ecological perspective into urban planning. Section two covers what frameworks exist for planning and managing the city under an ecological perspective; and what methods and tools are being used by different stake holders to implement an ecological vision today. As a synthesis, the paper suggest that ecological urbanism applies through six concepts (ecological networks, nestedness, cycles, flows, dynamic balance and resilience), which can be covered by three principles: I) an eco-systemic understanding and management of the city; II) a bioregional governance; III) an ecologically balanced planning. By doing so, this piece of work builds conceptually and practically a frame towards the transformation of current planning and management practices outlining clues for reinterpreting strategies to re-signify and re-conceptualize the existing dichotomous relationship between city-nature, environment-society, while strives for a new understanding of the way we inhabit the habitat.

This article sketches a vista of human inhabitation within the expanse of the natural world freed from human physical and discursive ownership. In that future, humanity is downscaled within the ecosphere, where the sixth extinction has been averted, climate change made tractable, and chemical poisons banned. To live bioregionally is to live in concord with the land and in accordance with its affordances; it is to belong with all its members, nonhuman and human, equitably and generously. To live as cosmopolitans is to be open to, connected with, and hospitable toward all Earthlings. Also cosmopolitan, in this article’s argument, is the pursuit of self-realization by a creative mash-up of cultural shards – a kind of intra-individual cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan bioregionalism is an imaginary founded on belonging to place and planet. It is a way of life inspired by the desire to remain near Earth’s being and cosmic wealth, with all the existential biddings of respect and delicacy such nearness entails

At the global level, voices are growing to criminalise severe environmental destruction as ecocide so that the International Criminal Court can punish. This social phenomenon suggests that international criminal law has been ineffective in protecting the environment and humanity at the time of planetary crisis. In parallel, however, only a small body of literature exists looking at how criminal justice is effective in preventing environmental damage at the domestic level. To address this research gap, this study first builds a green criminological perspective, which emphasises crimes of the powerful, and explains different types of ecocide. Then, it examines Korean environmental criminal law and demonstrates that high-level personnel in corporations have not been adequately held accountable for serious environmental destruction. As a viable option to strengthen criminal justice in the environment sector in Korea, it is argued that the Serious Accidents Punishment Act (SAPA) can be amended to hold business owners and other responsible persons accountable and liable for serious environmental crime caused by corporate activities.

This article suggests that incerased attention to the destruction of the environment in tandem with UN sanctions and embargoes may have negative economic impacts on developing countries and advocates for a lockstep approach at the international level similar to that of the COVID-19 response.

Bioregionalism is an environmental movement and social philosophy that envisions decentralized community self-rule within political boundaries redrawn to reflect the natural contours of differing ecosystem types. Emerging from the religious “counterculture” of the United States it has escaped these enclaves, and has begun to influence contemporary environmental politics and resource management strategies. Its goal is nothing less than to foster an ethics of place and create sustainable human societies in harmony with the natural world, and consistent with the flourishing of all native species. This paper assesses the history, types, impacts, perils and prospects of “countercultural” bioregionalism and its offshoots.