Local Environment 

About: Local Environment is an academic journal published by Routledge. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Sustainability & Sustainable development. It has an ISSN identifier of 1354-9839. Over the lifetime, 1644 publications have been published receiving 47076 citations.

Overcoming the ‘value‐action gap’ in environmental policy: Tensions between national policy and local experience

Abstract: This paper is concerned with debates over the implementation of sustainability objectives. In particular, it focuses on policies that address the ‘value‐action gap’ in environmental policy. Using evidence from the author's research connected with the UK Going for Green Sustainable Communities Project in Huntingdonshire, the paper highlights the tensions between national policies that are based on an ‘information deficit’ model of participation, and local research and experience that posits a more complex relationship between individuals and institutions. While this suggests the need to develop more differentiated policies based on the restructuring of socioeconomic and political institutions, the paper warns against knee‐jerk calls for more local, community or public participation which simply replace one set of generalised appeals with another. The paper concludes that greater emphasis must be placed on the negotiation of partnerships that are more sensitive to local diversity, and which involve...

Looking Back and Thinking Ahead: A Decade of Cities and Climate Change Research

Abstract: To many observers of climate change politics, 1997 was an important milestone because of the completion of the Kyoto Protocol negotiations. With considerably less fanfare, 1997 was also the year in...

Public Participation and Local Environmental Planning: The collective action problem and the potential of social capital

Abstract: Expanding the opportunities for public participation in environmental planning is not always the best option. Starting from an institutional public choice analysis of public participation in terms of the collective action problem, this paper emphasises the roots of participatory activities in the incentive structures facing potential participants. It then goes on to consider the strategies that may be adopted for encouraging greater public involvement and looks particularly to the social capital literature for suggestions of how institutional redesign may alter these incentive structures. The paper concludes by distinguishing three different modes of environmental planning, in terms of the rationale for participation, the severity of the collective action problem and the associated participatory strategy that can be adopted.

Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture's contradictions

Abstract: For many activists and scholars, urban agriculture in the Global North has become synonymous with sustainable food systems, standing in opposition to the dominant industrial agri-food system. At the same time, critical social scientists increasingly argue that urban agriculture programs, by filling the void left by the "rolling back" of the social safety net, underwrite neoliberalization. I argue that such contradictions are central to urban agriculture. Drawing on existing literature and fieldwork in Oakland, California, I explain how urban agriculture arises from a protective counter-movement, while at the same time entrenching the neoliberal organization of contemporary urban political economies through its entanglement with multiple processes of neoliberalization. By focusing on one interpretation or the other, however, rather than understanding such contradictions as internal and inherent, we risk undermining urban agriculture's transformative potential. Coming to terms with its internal contradictions can help better position urban agriculture within a coordinated efforts for structural change, rather than promoting farming in cities as an end unto itself, one of many means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

Mapping Sustainable Development as a Contested Concept

Abstract: Despite the continuing salience of sustainable development as a norm for planning and policymaking, there is still no consensus over the societal goals that would count as sustainable development. This paper builds on a longstanding, though always minority, tradition that sees this conceptual ambiguity and ensuing contestation as inevitable and explicable. Where many representations and analyses of sustainable development obscure this complexity, the purpose here is to provide analysts and practitioners alike with a way of exposing and analysing it, in order to avoid the pitfalls of conflating opposing positions that are cloaked within the comforting rhetoric of sustainable development. The paper sets out a way to map contesting interpretations of sustainable development in relation to each other and wider political debates, and thus provides a visual representation of sustainable development as an essentially contested concept that may counter the rhetorically powerful organizing representations...