This article investigates the dual role – exemplified by the ideal types of the consumer and the citizen – individuals face in the contemporary environmental policy context. As crowding-out theory highlights the implications of using the ‘wrong’ incentives, examining the match between policy and the value systems guiding individuals' decision-making process in practice is a relevant undertaking. Sweden provides the empirical context for the article, in which official environmental policy-discourse in Sweden is compared with the results of a mail-out survey to 4,000 individuals in four different counties. It is suggested that external motivations are perceived as highly relevant for the promotion of ecological sustainability, so the consumer element as a motivating feature of individuals' behaviour in the environmental field is indeed of considerable importance. However, at the same time people tend to ascribe far greater importance to the motivational values included in the self-transcendence cluster (altruism) as guiding principles in life than to the opposing values of self-enhancement (egoism), indicating that the citizen-role is also important to take into account in policy design. It is concluded that there is a mismatch between the content of Sweden's policy documents and the general value orientation held by the Swedish citizenry.
Review of Anarchy and the Environment edited by J. Samuel Barkin and George E. Shamaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. ISBN 0 7914 4183 0
Various insurance schemes are increasingly considered as part of a comprehensive set of responses aimed at adapting the world to future climate change. Insurance is believed to provide resources needed to rebuild societies following adverse effects of extreme weather events, and do so in a way that encourages preventive, risk-reducing action. After investigating the idea of climate insurance from a normative standpoint, it is argued that when understood conventionally - i.e. commercially - climate insurance is a highly unattractive idea. There are more defensible models of reactive adaptation that retain aspects of insurance, including, in particular, a model that is more reminiscent of a (global) social insurance model
This article reveals the existence of a so-called "ghost policy" (informal tradition and/or obsolete policy rules) that resists new official policy concerning the management of natural resources in Sweden. These ghost policies are often ignored by decision makers in the Swedish policy making process inhibiting, therefore, viable and legitimate solutions to the profound negative consequences that costly local conflicts of interest have on democracy. These conflicts of interest expose and represent a classic and current problem intrinsic to the communitarian policy process in Sweden. That is, since the Swedish policy process has a blind spot, that is it focuses on the views of experts and interest organisations, it, subsequently, overlooks the perceptions of those stakeholders (in this case game hunters) affected by policy. This situation undermines the policy's goals since they are alien to local tradition. Furthermore, not just the existence and ubiquity of ghost policies, but even social facts such as the physical size and membership of an organisation were found to influence conflicts of interest. This implies that a more legitimate policy process is necessary. Therefore, the Swedish policy process ought to include collaborations with locals and social engineering. This will lead to a more legitimate natural resource management in rural Swedish settings.
In theory, ecological citizenship (EC) has been suggested as a driver of individual pro-environmental behaviour (PEB), providing a more stable foundation for lifestyle changes than reliance on external policy tools. The relevance of EC for explaining PEB is tested by applying data from a Swedish survey designed to capture various aspects of EC. A significant proportion of Swedes fulfil the values-based requirements of ecological citizenship, as outlined in EC-theory. Furthermore, individuals who think along the lines of EC are more likely than others to behave in an environmentally friendly manner in their day-to-day activities. Certain aspects of EC are more important for PEB than others, which implies the need for further theoretical development of EC theory
By creating attitudinal rifts among partisan voters, political polarization is expected to negatively affect chances of effectively mitigating climate change. While such expectations generally have found support, less attention has been paid to the opposite claim that political consensus should eliminate the partisan dimension in climate change politics. This study tests this claim by studying how party identification, and party cues specifically, affects public policy attitudes in a context defined by political consensus. Using data from a large online access panel in Sweden, party identification and party cues are shown to matter for policy attitudes even in a consensus context. This effect is not limited to certain issues but is found across a wide range of policies, and the effect of party cues, for a given issue, varies across parties. The implications of this study and areas for future work are discussed.
Review of Environmental Policy by Jane Roberts (Routledge Introductions to Environment Series). London: Routledge, 2003. ISBN 0 4151 9885 2 and 9886 0
Review of Consuming Sustainability: Critical Social Analyses of Ecological Change, edited by Debra Davidson and Kierstin Hatt. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2005. Pp. 296. ISBN 1 55266 155 5
Review of The Global Environment: Institutions, Law, and Policy, 2nd edn, edited by Regina S. Axelrod, David Leonard Downie and Norman J. Vig. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2005. ISBN 1-5680-2827-X
As energy security, climate change and other environmental concerns remain prominent on the global agenda, international organizations and states have created policies intended to foster the development of renewable energy. With wind power projected to make the largest contribution to Europe’s renewable energy mix, the EU and EU member-states have created an institutional framework designed to that favor the development of wind power. While some states have been successful in reaching their renewable energy goals, others have been less so. This article seeks to understand the reasons why states are successful in achieving their intended policy outcomes despite the inherent difficulties in implementing policy. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as a point-of-departure, this article will explore the relationship between the beliefs of national lawmakers, policy outputs and policy impacts, as well as how these relationships can help explain wind power policy implementation.
What institutional conditions seem relevant for multi-sector environmental policy integration (EPI) and its outcomes? Analysing the Swedish bioenergy policy process, which represents a positive case of multi-sector environmental policy integration, it is argued that open actor access, use of environmental knowledge, monitoring mechanisms, and both environment-sectoral and inter-sectoral policy coordination are conducive for multi-sector environmental policy integration, which is also affected by external events. To achieve outcomes from multi-sector environmental policy integration, monitoring mechanisms as well as inter-sectoral policy coordination are important. Key words: environmental policy integration; multi-sector EPI; policy coordination; institutions; bioenergy