We welcome you to Volume 18 (4) of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, in which we publish seven articles that continue the Journal’s tradition of providing a critical engagement with a wide range of pressing environmental issues from regions throughout the world. The range of topics, including renewable energy, climate change action, fisheries, organic agriculture, water governance and sustainability policy, reflect some of key challenges for policy-makers and we believe the Journal can continue to make a valuable contribution to these by publishing research that questions the barriers, dynamics, effectiveness and unintended consequences of environmental policy. The papers included in this issue typify this in that they all speak to the challenges of policy implementation.
Policy implementation is confronted directly in the papers by Lucie Laurian and Jan Crawford (on sustainable planning in the US) and by Sissel Hovi and Gro Sandkjær Hanssen (EU’s Water Framework Directive in Norway). Laurian and Crawford examine how sustainability goals are implemented through local planning in small to mid-sized cities in the US, drawing on a theoretical framework from Transition Management. They find that implementation is closely related to organisational culture within municipalities and that public support is a strong predictor of the extent of implementation. Linked to this, they find that commitment from local politicians is a central barrier to implementation. This aligns with the findings of Hovi and Hanssen in their research on the implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) in Norway. They describe the complexity of the governance arrangements for the WFD and emphasise the importance of ‘political anchorage’ (i.e. linking policy networks and governance arrangements with more traditional forms of political representation and control, such as municipalities and counties). Both these papers serve to highlight that while environmental challenges often stimulate new governance arrangements they must still have a meaningful relationship with political institutions that can command strong leadership and citizens' allegiance. In other words, no matter how innovative a policy solution may seem, unless it can engage critical stakeholders and gain political ownership, it is unlikely to be sustained. This of course reflects a central theme in the papers we publish in JEPP; policy takes place in a highly politicised environment and insights generated from critical social science can be as important to securing successful outcomes as the insights generated from the ‘hard’ science of disciplines such as ecology or hydrology.
This theme also has prominence in Noelle C. Boucquey’s paper on fisheries management (specifically of the red drum species in North Carolina), which echoes calls for more effective social science input into environmental policy, based on her assessment of the hierarchy of knowledge that privileges the findings of the scientific assessment of fishery stocks over the everyday experiences of those involved in, and making a living from fishing. This not only highlights imbalances of power that emerge from different forms of knowledge but also suggests that increasing scientific information does little to resolve resource conflicts. Boucquey therefore suggests that a greater emphasis on deliberative forms of policy-making, which create opportunities for discussing how alternative meanings are created and reproduced, can highlight where policy interventions can be the most effective. As with other papers in this issue, Boucquey emphasises how important social acceptance of policy aims and rationales is to the ultimate implementation of environmental policy.
Further perspectives of policy implementation are highlighted in the paper by Prabhat Upadhyaya who examines the Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) arising from UNFCCC negotiations and its Bali Action Plan. NAMAs were intended to allow developing countries to begin to address climate mitigation without compromising other social objectives. Upadhyaya follows this logic by examining NAMA projects in South Africa. He shows how South Africa actively engaged with international negotiations to bring forward NAMAs, yet appears to have been less successful in its domestic pursuit of this policy agenda. The paper suggests that contestation has crept into every stage of the policy process at the national-level of NAMA because of an inability to overcome domestic vested interests and to use the international initiative to add value to domestically available concepts. This specifically highlights the tension between the capacity of a nation to be a progressive international policy broker and its ability to pursue national development goals framed by existing power structures and entrenched problem-framing. More broadly, the paper highlights the issue of scale in environmental policy and the particular difficulties of resolving tensions that may become apparent when environmental issues are viewed at different spatial levels or by different sets of actors.
The two papers in this issue that touch on the deployment of renewable energy also confront barriers to successful implementation. Thierry Spiess and Christopher De Sousa present a paper on ‘brightfields’ (brownfields reused for renewable energy) and identify a range of technical, institutional and financial barriers to such development. The paper suggests that brightfield development attracts less public opposition for renewable development than in examples of ‘conventional’ renewable energy development, but still require additional regulatory support to be successful. Public opposition is also the focus of the paper by Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield, who highlight how health impacts have emerged as the main concerns of host communities in the case of the Australian wind energy sector. The authors argue that health and noise have become the key signifiers for explaining the ‘social gap’ between the broad public support for renewable energy and the intensity of local opposition to specific projects. It is clear from this paper, and wider experience throughout the world, that the social acceptance of wind energy often stands as the key limiting factor in further implementation, adding to our claim of why a deeper understanding of social and political dimensions to environmental policy is so crucial.
Heidrun Moschitz, Andrea Hrabalova and Matthias Stolze examine the network dynamics of organic farming, drawing on the case of the Czech Republic, using a longitudinal study of between 2004 and 2014. They map the distribution of power in this network and show how influence has shifted over 10 years from non-state actors such as organic farming organisations to the Ministry of Agriculture. While the authors show how levels of competence and active engagement in debates around agricultural policy have been maintained, they also highlight how mainstream farming organisations have been drawn into the policy network as organic farming has increased in significance, resulting in a loss of influence of the original stakeholders. This therefore complements the other papers in the volume by highlighting the different pathways that a policy can take as different constellations of stakeholders become involved, which in this case has strengthened, rather than diminished, the case for better environmental outcomes and more effective policy implementation, but also partly disowned the original environmental proponents.
We would also like to take the opportunity of this Editorial to thank our departing Co-Editor, Dr Alex Franklin, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University. Alex joined the Journal as a Co-Editor in 2011 and helped it through a period of restructuring that has put it on a very strong footing and consolidated its position as a leading journal in its field. Indeed, as we say goodbye to Alex, we also celebrate the Journal achieving its highest ever JCR Impact Factor (1.745 for 2015) and its expansion to six issues in 2017. Many thanks to Alex for all her help in making JEPP such a successful Journal and in so doing, making a valuable contribution to the wider academic community.
While we say farewell to Alex, we would also like to welcome a new Co-Editor, Dr Andrea K. Gerlak, currently a faculty research associate at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and director of academic development with the International Studies Association (ISA). In August 2016, Andrea will join the faculty of the University of Arizona as an Associate Professor in the School of Geography and Development and Associate Research Professor in the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. Formerly, a faculty member at Guilford College and Columbia University, Andrea has nurtured an interest in the management of water resources including questions of institutional change and adaptation to climate change in river basins, and human rights and equity issues in water governance. Andrea has much to offer our Editorial team, not least her expertise in water governance, an area in which we see an increasing number of paper submissions and a growing profile in terms of the broader intellectual debates of environmental policy. Water governance is also central to many of the current environmental challenges such as climate change, demographic growth and related aspects of resource stress, so we hope we will now be better placed to facilitate further critical reflection of these issues in the future.
In addition to her expertise in this field, we also hope that Andrea will help raise the profile of the Journal within North America, which complements our addition of a Co-Editor based in Australia (Carsten Daugbjerg, Australian National University, Canberra) in 2014. This issue shows that the Journal continues to attract good quality papers from all over the world, with North America (3), Europe (2) Africa (1) and Australasia (1) represented amongst these pages. However, over the last year more than half downloads, citations and submissions were from researchers based in Europe and while we are excited about the continual stream of good quality papers we receive from our authors, we are also cognisant of a broader duty to serve a global network of researchers in environmental policy and planning and would like to better reflect the vibrancy of debates from all parts of the world. We have therefore identified North America as a region in which we believe the Journal could do better to engage researchers in critical social science perspectives of environmental policy. We look forward to further expanding our horizons in the coming years.
20th June 2016