Profile

The transportation sector is the largest consumer of fossil fuels; making it a major producer of greenhouse gases. Due to declining fossil fuel reserves and increasingly stringent vehicle emission regulations globally, it is essential to shift to alternative energy sources. Economic and eco-friendly fuel-efficient hybrid, electric, and fuel cell vehicles are regarded as one of the best alternative solutions to cope with the government policies and to reduce the rise in global temperature caused by the automotive sector. Technological advancements in fuel cells, batteries, and chargers have further supported the development of electric vehicles. The major challenges of range and charging time in electric vehicles can be countered by range extension technology and developing all-electric hybrid vehicles. In this review, a comprehensive study of different type of vehicles and their architectures are presented. Insights on energy storage devices and converters of electric vehicles currently in use were also provided. Furthermore, various fuel cell advancements and the technical challenges faced during the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles were highlighted.

Climate change adaptation is currently an important community concern in developing countries like Bangladesh. The conceptualization of adaptation within the government system matters for the promotion of activities such as employment generation for local communities. The lesser the gap between government policy and the local community's needs for adaptation the more effective outcomes are for ensuring policy success and promoting sustainable community livelihoods or vice versa. This interface between policy and community is important for climate change adaptation which is explored in this paper along with the findings of the research project, DEltas, vulnerability and climate change: Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA) conducted during 2014–2018 in Bangladesh, Ghana, India, and the United Kingdom. The data from Bangladesh was collected from 1384 survey respondents, 19 Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), 3 workshops, and 43 Key Informant Interviews (KIIs). The findings of the paper show that government adaptation activities mainly reflect the Reactive Approach of Limited Action (RALA) perspective rather than the Proactive Approach to Adaptation (PATA). The RALA perspective is characterized by piecemeal and top-down approaches to adaptation which fail to recognize a community conceptualization of climate change, policy perspectives for coping with local concerns, and governance approaches for effective adaptation. In response, the government needs to focus on the PATA in policy, programs, and projects with the governance approach implemented from the bottom-up or, in other words, from the local perspective. Community participation in decision-making processes is characteristic of this bottom-up governance model. Local community participation, consultation, and representation are essential parts of PATA in adaptation policy formulation and execution, providing important lessons for Bangladesh.

Discursive choices made by policy entrepreneurs are an important factor in the development of climate change acts (CCAs). This article examines the extent to which such choices reflect the strategic need for CCA entrepreneurs to compromise pragmatically and modulate their policy preferences in order to secure the agreement needed for CCA adoption. Drawing upon theoretical insights from discursive institutionalism (DI) and policy entrepreneurship, this article analyses discursive choices during negotiations surrounding the New Zealand Zero Carbon Act (ZCA). The analysis shows that endogenous political-ideological constraints compelled entrepreneurial actors to modify first-choice preferences for emissions reduction legislation by reframing their coordinative discursive interventions to accommodate potentially oppositional groups. Further research is required into the conditions under which such strategies become discursively operational, to provide guidance to climate policy entrepreneurs as CCAs continue to diffuse globally.

In the era of the Anthropocene, understanding the dynamic interactions between humans and water is crucial for supporting both human well-being and the sustainable management of resources. The current water management challenges are inherently unpredictable and difficult to control. Social-ecological systems (SESs) approaches explicitly recognize the connections and feedbacks between human and natural systems. For addressing the complex challenges of the Anthropocene, consideration of SES attributes such as causality (or interdependence), feedback, non-linearity, heterogeneity, and cross-scale dynamics is important. In addition, innovative qualitative and quantitative methods such as Bayesian networks, agent-based modelling, system dynamics, network analysis, multicriteria analysis, integrated assessment and role-play games have recently been used in SES research. The overall goal of this review is to gauge the extent to which SES attributes and methods are considered within the current interdisciplinary water paradigm. The paper therefore develops the normative theoretical characteristics of SES in terms of its key attributes (i.e. causality, feedback, heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and cross-scale dynamics) incorporated in the water paradigm approaches. The paper then compares the methods applied in the interdisciplinary water paradigm and examines how they can complement each other. Finally, the paper reflects back on the usefulness of SES attributes and methods for assessing the interdisciplinary water paradigm and makes recommendations for future research.

The recent global diffusion of circular economy regulatory policy packages (CERPPs) raises questions over their extent, composition and, critically, potential effectiveness. While research into circular economy (CE) regulation is growing, a dearth of analyses of the optimal design of CE policy packages presents a clear gap in the literature. This paper therefore surveys current waste management policy to identify the degree to which circular economy practices are being translated into public policy globally. Examining resource use and waste management policy in 60 countries, the paper first provides a snapshot of the global spread of CE policy packages. Secondly, the assessment framework is applied to three case studies of recent CE policy packages from Finland, Greece and South Korea. These cases fall some way short of theoretical optimality, suggesting that long-term CERPP effectiveness is questionable.

The practice of hair dyeing is a rapidly expanding industry on a global scale; however, it has become a major concern for Asian countries because they have been undergoing rapid transformations of their environment and lifestyles. While the socio-economic benefits and impacts of this globalization trend are widely understood, the environmental effects are largely unknown. In particular, commonly available oxidative dyes potentially pose specific environmental risks due to their use of a toxic aromatic amine p-Phenylenediamine (PPD). In investigating the environmental impacts of PPD chemicals, we first provide context to the study by setting out the socio-psychological drivers to industrial expansion in Asian countries along with an overview of research into its effects, to show that its environmental impacts are under-researched. We then investigate the environmental toxicity of PPD by focusing on the role of microbes in metabolizing waste products. Results show that Acinetobacter baumannii EB1 isolated from dye effluent prevents autoxidation of PPD under oxygen-enriched (shaking) or oxygen-deficient (static) conditions representing different environmental settings. Microbes transformed PPD into more toxic metabolites, which then significantly reduced plant growth, thereby having a direct bearing on ecosystem services. Based on the findings, we argue that stricter regulatory controls on hair dye wastewater are necessary, particularly in newly industrialising Asian countries where the expansion of commercial practice is most prevalent.

The European Union (EU) has established a major role in directing policy change, both internally and beyond its borders: a phenomenon known as ‘Europeanisation’. This article examines the Europeanisation of water policy in Turkey in relation to implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). Although some principles of EU water policy have been adopted in Turkey, the WFD has also been subject to significant domestic modification, prompting questions about how and why such patterns of partial implementation occur. In this respect, learning and socialisation within transnational ‘instrument constituencies’ (ICs) is shown to be an important explanatory factor. It follows that diffusion of the EU’s water policy and the WFD beyond its borders may be enhanced by promoting the capacity for instrument constituency learning (or the ‘cognitive environment’) in non-EU countries.

While the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in 2015, establishes an ambitious set of goals, targets and indicators for supporting global sustainability, greater conceptual clarity is required to measure implementation. A key UN Target (6.5) for implementing sustainable development goal (SDG) 6 is to ‘implement integrated water resources management (IWRM) at all levels’. However, we argue that the current UN emphasis on measuring its implementation through institutional indicators limits our understanding of effectiveness, while ignoring links to other SDGs. While IWRM is often interpreted to mean the integration of water-related management components at the river basin scale, conceptualizations differ significantly. Specifying the critical normative principles of IWRM, therefore, becomes important for measuring its implementation. Drawing upon pre-existing conceptualizations, we consequently identify seven core principles or dimensions (integration; scale; institutions; participation; economic valuation; equity; and, environmental/ecological protection) to re-conceptualize IWRM after the adoption of agenda 2030. These dimensions, we argue, allow more objective measurement of IWRM implementation through the development of Target 6.5 sub-indicators. They also help shift IWRM beyond its current ‘water centric’ emphasis to enhance its contribution to achieving other SDGs such as those for ending poverty, providing clean and affordable energy, achieving gender equality, protecting terrestrial ecosystems, promoting sustainable cities, combatting hunger and climate change, and strengthening the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has become a global paradigm for the governance of surface, coastal and groundwater. International bodies such as the European Union, the GlobalWater Partnership, and the United Nations have taken the lead to promoteIWRMprinciples, while countries worldwide have undertaken reforms to implement these principles and to restructure their domestic or regional water governance arrangements. However, the international transfer of IWRM principles raises a number of theoretical, empirical and normative questions related to its causes, processes and outcomes. These questions will be explored in our Special Issue 'Governing IWRM: Mutual Learning and Policy Transfer'. This editorial briefly introduces IWRM and links this governance paradigm to theoretical and empirical scholarship on policy transfer. We then summarise the aims and objectives of this Special Issue, provide an overview of the articles brought together here and offer avenues for future research.

The Water Framework Directive (WFD) not only recast water management practices within the European Union (EU); it also opened a new chapter for the EU's external ambitions in the field of water. The central vehicle here is the EU Water Initiative (EUWI), a transnational, multi-actor partnership approach that was established in 2002 to support wider United Nations development goals. The EUWI is underpinned by principles such as river basin planning, resource efficiency, and participation, and the WFD serves as a legal and political template for achieving these aims in interested partner countries. This article analyses the implementation of the Initiative in all five partnerships: Africa, China, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean; it argues that the Initiative's origins in sustainable development related global debates led to selective interpretations of water management principles in these diverse social, political and ecological contexts. In short, these five partnerships emphasise different aspects of the three pillars of sustainable development, and their respective interpretations result in the different WFD variants outside of Europe. These patterns, we argue, not only reflect contextual differences but also strategic EU and member state foreign policy imperatives that have influenced how the WFD has been promoted globally.

Turkey's protracted European Union (EU) accession process has resulted in the transfer of environmental policy, primarily the water acquis. Despite a recent reversal in accession negotiations, this process is continuing and has thereby resulted in the active Europeanisation of Turkish water policy. However, the resultant pattern of Europeanisation remains poorly understood with questions arising as to whether policy transfer is leading to significant convergence with EU policy, or if a uniquely Turkish hybrid system of water governance is emerging. The paper therefore provides an analysis of transfer outcomes from the EUWater Framework Directive (WFD), using eight core institutional features: identification of river basins; transboundary cooperation; environmental objectives setting; characterisation of river basins; monitoring; cost recovery and water pricing; river basin management planning; and public participation. While analysis of legal frameworks and their implementation shows many areas of emulation, some features of the WFD in Turkey are an amalgam of pre-existing water institutions, the mimetic influence of integrated water resources management (IWRM) norms, EU policy and changing national water policy priorities: what we call assembled emulation. This observation has implications for future studies on policy transfer, Europeanisation, IWRM and Turkish accession.

Tidal River Management (TRM) is a local adaptation strategy for coastal floodplains in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh. TRM involves the periodic opening and closing of embankments to accelerate land accretion (or reclamation) in a floodplain. Although the approach is considered a promising adaptation strategy, there have been both positive and negative outcomes from recent TRM implementation. The aim of this study is consequently to explore the institutional (community, rules-in-use, and also biophysical) factors influencing successes and failures of TRM implementation for managing common-pool resources, as a basis for making recommendations on future institutional design. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, first developed by Ostrom (2010) and revised by Bisaro and Hinkel (2016), is therefore used to conduct comparative analysis of TRM institutional effectiveness in three Delta floodplains or beels: one led by a local community and the other two by national authorities. Our research employs a mixed method approach involving focus group discussions, stakeholder interviews, site visits, along with secondary literature analysis. The results of this assessment provide insights into coastal adaptation governance that could inform TRM implementation in Bangladesh and other similar contexts worldwide.

The circular economy (CE) concept is informing the governance of resource use and waste management on a global scale, leading to widespread policy instrument innovation. However, the recent appearance of CE ‘policy portfolios’ raises questions about whether such policies are genuinely path-breaking or are merely adjustments to existing arrangements. Tracing the emergence of the European Union’s Circular Economy Package shows that, while some measures are genuinely novel, many others are ‘patched’ onto pre-existing instruments and that the overall portfolio exhibits a high degree of institutional ‘layering’. Given the evidence of relative ineffectiveness of past incremental environmental interventions, there is a mismatch between such approaches and the scale, pace and scope of transformation implied by contemporary articulations of the circular economy concept. Creating the policy conditions for sustainable production and consumption may require more radical policy formulations than CE proponents acknowledge.

Collective political action among divergent interest groups is not always easy. It requires coordination, compromise and, often, the persuasive action of a policy entrepreneur. Coalition strategies are often shaped by participants’ skill in mobilising ideas. Business-environmental coalitions – often considered ‘strange bedfellows’ – have proved to be important in emissions trading policy-making. In 2013, chronically low emissions prices meant that the EU’s climate policy flagship, the EU-ETS, was holed beneath the waterline. But, within two years and against the odds, ambitious reforms were agreed to steady the ship. Crucial to the rescue were the actions of a pro-ETS business lobby, orchestrated by environmentalists. We draw on thirty-two in-depth interviews to construct a discursive institutionalist account of collective interest representation in relation to the reforms. We highlight the ability of policy entrepreneurs to fashion a ‘change-but-no-change’ pro-reform narrative attractive to businesses, despite the fact that such discursive strategies risked marginalising alternative and more disruptive ideas.

Water legislation in Turkey continues to undergo a gradual Europeanisation, despite a slowing European Union (EU) accession process, raising questions over how it is occurring. As a condition of accession to the EU, Turkey has been compelled to adopt the Union's water acquis, comprised of multiple sectoral policy instruments. Few studies, however, have sought to measure the sectoral volume, scope and velocity of Europeanisation in Turkish water legal frameworks during this period. By developing an evaluative approach, based on a qualitative assessment of these three 'dimensions' of legal Europeanisation, this study shows that the influence of EU accession on domestic water law has proved variable. While some areas of Turkish water legislation, primarily related to nitrates pollution, river basin planning and coastal bathing water, demonstrate significant Europeanisation, others have experienced less transformative change. Meanwhile, elements of the EU water acquis have yet to be adopted. Prospects for the future development of Turkish water legislation are then discussed on the basis of the analysis.

The selection and design of renewable electricity support instruments is an important part of EU energy policy and central to the governance of the Energy Union. In 2014, the European Commission published updated guidelines for state aid that effectively mandate the EU-wide implementation of auctions for allocating revenue support to commercial scale renewable electricity generation. This article argues that the RES auction’s rapid ascent towards dominance is explained by a coincidence of an activist interpretation of EU state aid law creating demand for knowledge about the instrument and the emergence of a ready source of supply from a burgeoning community of a RES auction specialists and experts. Knowledge gained through EU-wide implementation of auctions further adds to supply of auctions expertise among the community. The implications of positive feedback between instrument demand and the growing supply of knowledge about an instrument reinforces the importance of critical engagement between policymakers and policy experts.

Anthropogenic hybridization is widely perceived as a threat to the conservation of biodiversity. Nevertheless, to date, relevant policy and management interventions are unresolved and highly convoluted. While this is due to the inherent complexity of the issue, we hereby hypothesize that a lack of agreement concerning management goals and approaches, within the scientific community, may explain the lack of social awareness on this phenomenon, and the absence of effective pressure on decision-makers. By focusing on wolf x dog hybridization in Europe, we hereby (a) assess the state of the art of issues on wolf x dog hybridization within the scientific community, (b) assess the conceptual bases for different viewpoints, and (c) provide a conceptual framework aiming at reducing the disagreements. We adopted the Delphi technique, involving a three-round iterative survey addressed to a selected sample of experts who published at Web of Science listed journals, in the last 10 years on wolf x dog hybridization and related topics. Consensus was reached that admixed individuals should always be defined according to their genetic profile, and that a reference threshold for admixture (i.e. q-value in assignment tests) should be formally adopted for their identification. To mitigate hybridization, experts agreed on adopting preventive, proactive and, when concerning small and recovering wolf populations, reactive interventions. Overall, experts' consensus waned as the issues addressed became increasingly practical, including the adoption of lethal removal. We suggest three non-mutually exclusive explanations for this trend: (i) value-laden viewpoints increasingly emerge when addressing practical issues, and are particularly diverging between experts with different disciplinary backgrounds (e.g. ecologists, geneticists); (ii) some experts prefer avoiding the risk of potentially giving carte blanche to wolf opponents to (illegally) remove wolves, based on the wolf x dog hybridization issue; (iii) room for subjective interpretation and opinions result from the paucity of data on the effectiveness of different management interventions. These results have management implications and reveal gaps in the knowledge on a wide spectrum of issues related not only to the management of anthropogenic hybridization, but also to the role of ethical values and real-world management concerns in the scientific debate.

In England, the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 provides specific roles for Lead Local Flood Authorities in flood and coastal erosion risk management. Under Section 9 of the Act, authorities are responsible for preparing, applying, and monitoring a local flood risk management strategy that balances community input into flood management with national policy objectives. Authorities are legally obliged to consider specified requirements in strategy production, including consultation with the public. Using an evaluative framework based on legal requirements and local government guidelines, this study assesses the extent to which these requirements have been met in a sample of 43 strategies. Our findings suggest that strategies generally meet minimal legal requirements, although variance exists in approaches adopted, particularly in respect of consultation and links to other environmental management aspects. Recommendations for enhancing future practice are provided.

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) assumes coherence between cognate aspects of water governance at the river basin scale, for example water quality, energy production and agriculture objectives. But critics argue that IWRM is often less ‘integrated’ in practice, raising concerns over inter-sectoral coherence between implementing institutions. One increasingly significant aspect of IWRM is adaptation to climate change-related risks, including threats from flooding, which are particularly salient in England. Although multiple institutional mechanisms exist for flood risk management (FRM), their coherence remains a critical question for national adaptation. This paper therefore (1) maps the multi-level institutional frameworks determining both IWRM and FRM in England; (2) examines their interaction via various inter-institutional coordinating mechanisms; and (3) assesses the degree of coherence. The analysis suggests that cognate EU strategic objectives for flood risk assessment demonstrate relatively high vertical and horizontal coherence with river basin planning. However, there is less coherence with flood risk requirements for land-use planning and national flood protection objectives. Overall, this complex governance arrangement actually demonstrates de-coherence over time due to ongoing institutional fragmentation. Recommendations for increasing IWRM coherence in England or re-coherence based on greater spatial planning and coordination of water-use and land-use strategies are proposed.

Due to both natural and anthropogenic forces, the south west part of the Ganges-Brahmaputra coastal area is facing diverse problems such as waterlogging, salinity, and loss of biodiversity. In order to address these challenges, local people have identified ‘tidal river management (TRM)’ as a comprehensive approach for sustainably managing this part of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin. However, due to institutional limitations, mismanagement and social conflicts, application of the TRM approach is not straightforward. In order to identify existing implementation barriers and to effectively apply the TRM approach, a transdisciplinary approach is examined for its potential to inform the re-shaping of TRM governing values and actions. It is argued that a thorough application of a transdisciplinary framework is essential, supported by the active involvement of key agencies and local stakeholders. The proposed transdisciplinary framework can potentially be applied to TRM projects for solving waterlogging and associated problems in order to achieve greater sustainability of the area.

The adoption of bioregionalism by institutions that are instrumental in river basin management has significant potential to resolve complex water resource management problems. The Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT) in England provides an example of how localized bioregional institutionalization of adaptive comanagement, consensus decision making, local participation, indigenous technical and social knowledge, and “win-win” outcomes can potentially lead to resilient partnership working. Our analysis of the WRT’s effectiveness in confronting nonpoint source water pollution, previously impervious to centralized agency responses, provides scope for lesson-drawing on institutional design, public engagement, and effective operation, although some evident issues remain.

The European Union (EU) Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires EU member states to produce and implement river basin management plans, which are to be designed and updated via participatory processes that inform, consult with, and actively involve all interested stakeholders. The assumption of the European Commission is that stakeholder participation, and institutional adaptation and procedural innovation to facilitate it, are essential to the effectiveness of river basin planning and, ultimately, the environmental impact of the Directive. We analyzed official documents and the WFD literature to compare implementation of the Directive in EU member states in the initial WFD planning phase (2000-2009). Examining the development of participatory approaches to river basin management planning, we consider the extent of transformation in EU water governance over the period. Employing a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, we map the implementation "trajectories" of 13 member states, and then provide a detailed examination of shifts in river basin planning and participation in four member states (Germany, Sweden, Poland and France) to illustrate the diversity of institutional approaches observed. We identify a general tendency towards increased, yet circumscribed, stakeholder participation in river basin management in the member states examined, alongside clear continuities in terms of their respective pre-WFD institutional and procedural arrangements. Overall, the WFD has driven a highly uneven shift to river basin-level planning among the member states, and instigated a range of efforts to institutionalize stakeholder involvement-often through the establishment of advisory groups to bring organized stakeholders into the planning process.

Water legislation in Turkey continues to undergo a gradual Europeanisation, despite a slowing European Union (EU) accession process, raising questions over how it is occurring. As a condition of accession to the EU, Turkey has been compelled to adopt the Union's water acquis, comprised of multiple sectoral policy instruments. Few studies, however, have sought to measure the sectoral volume, scope and velocity of Europeanisation in Turkish water legal frameworks during this period. By developing an evaluative approach, based on a qualitative assessment of these three 'dimensions' of legal Europeanisation, this study shows that the influence of EU accession on domestic water law has proved variable. While some areas of Turkish water legislation, primarily related to nitrates pollution, river basin planning and coastal bathing water, demonstrate significant Europeanisation, others have experienced less transformative change. Meanwhile, elements of the EU water acquis have yet to be adopted. Prospects for the future development of Turkish water legislation arc then discussed on the basis of the analysis.

Although macro-level analyses of EU policy outputs are common, few empirical studies have measured the long-run evolution of the Union’s energy policy sector. This article provides an overview of European energy legislation to show past sectoral developmental trends, current characteristics and potential future directions. During this period, EU energy policy has evolved sequentially to encompass multiple sectors, including coal, nuclear energy, oil and gas production, energy conservation, market harmonisation and climate change concerns. Moreover, by measuring the velocity of legislative output as an indicator of policy activity, the overall picture is one of gradual incremental growth centred broadly on several episodes of shallow, delayed action punctuated equilibrium that has resulted in an uneven mixture of national and supranational decision-making. Expansion is perhaps set to continue along a similar path as a common EU climate–energy policy emerges, although some constraints are evident.

This paper provides a review of the emerging literature on the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus and then analyses the nexus in the context of Bangladesh. Results suggest that the WEF nexus is not yet recognized in the policy documents of Bangladesh, while conflicts over these resources are growing. In order to reduce this contestation, ‘policy integration’ is recommended for implementing key policies in the WEF nexus.

This paper provides a review of the emerging literature on the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus and then analyses the nexus in the context of Bangladesh. Results suggest that the WEF nexus is not yet recognized in the policy documents of Bangladesh, while conflicts over these resources are growing. In order to reduce this contestation, ‘policy integration’ is recommended for implementing key policies in the WEF nexus.

Nexus thinking, in the form of integrating water security with agriculture, energy and climate concerns, is normatively argued to help better transition societies towards greener economies and the wider goal of sustainable development. Yet several issues emerge from the current debate surrounding this concept, namely the extent to which such conceptualisations are genuinely novel, whether they complement (or are replacing) existing environmental governance approaches and how - if deemed normatively desirable - the nexus can be enhanced in national contexts. This paper therefore reviews the burgeoning nexus literature to determine some common indicative criteria before examining its implementation in practice vis-à-vis more established integrated water resources management (IWRM) models. Evidence from two divergent national contexts, the UK and Bangladesh, suggests that the nexus has not usurped IWRM, while integration between water, energy, climate and agricultural policy objectives is generally limited. Scope for greater merging of nexus thinking within IWRM is then discussed.

Recent years have witnessed significant worldwide growth in research into the production of algal biomass for fuel, food and food supplements, nutrient recovery from wastewater and feedstocks for chemical and pharmaceutical industries. While there appear to be considerable future benefits, especially in terms of sustainable low carbon energy biofuels, emerging evidence suggests that large-scale algal production could impose multiple negative environmental impacts. Pressing questions therefore concern the significance of these impacts and the adequacy of attendant governance arrangements in ensuring environmental protection. To examine these questions, a qualitative impact assessment methodology is utilised to review, identify and compare the significance of potential impacts from several different production scenarios. Our findings show that significance varies not only between open pond and photo bioreactor (PBR) processes but also between land-based, coastal and marine production sites. We then examine how well these impacts are currently regulated in one specific political context, namely the European Union (EU). Analysis of EU environmental governance reveals evidence of significant policy mismatches and gaps. Recommendations for the future multi-level governance of algal biofuel technologies in the EU and globally are given, along with suggestions for further scientific and policy research as part of a wider investigative agenda. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Optimizing the capacity to adapt to climate change impacts has become a critical challenge for human societies. This article therefore evaluates how integrated water resource management (IWRM) approaches help enhance adaptive capacity to climate change impacts on water resources. An evaluative framework is derived from key IWRM principles and their roles in modulating adaptive capacity. This framework is then used to evaluate IWRM implementation in Bangladesh. The analysis draws on policy documents, interviews and a survey of policy makers. Results suggest that policy principles and implementation in favour of IWRM can be a source of success but also of failure for adaptive capacity. Recommendations for amending the concept with the aim of increasing adaptive capacity are outlined. © 2014 Taylor & Francis.

Participatory environmental governance is increasing worldwide. One area where such governance forms are apparent is in the management of water resources. For example, in the European Union the Water Framework Directive mandates several forms of involvement via its legal obligations. Under the Directive, implementing agencies should provide information on river basin management planning to the public, consult citizens and stakeholders during planning and actively involve interested parties in the plan process. Yet questions arise over the success of participatory processes on the ground in EU member states. In this study, participation was therefore evaluated in WFD river basin planning in England and Wales using process, community, output and outcome-related indicators. Research was conducted through extensive quantitative and qualitative data collection over a long temporal scale within case analyses of the Anglian, Humber and South West river basin districts. Results suggest that while the first phase of river basin management largely met legal requirements, the actual success of participatory water governance was mixed. On this basis, recommendations are made for enhancing participation in future river basin planning through national and EU policy. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.

Stakeholder participation in environmental management has become widespread globally while the normative benefits of multi-stakeholder processes in governing natural resources are promoted by academics and policy makers. As projections indicate more frequent and intense flood events with future climate change, this article examines one stakeholder participation process within UK flood risk management to evaluate whether it contributes to enhancing effective engagement, through social learning. Evidence is derived from multiple interviews conducted within the England's Regional Flood and Coastal Committees (RFCCs), which were specifically introduced to better integrate local level interests in regional flood defence decision-making. In testing a modified 'individual-community interaction' learning framework, it is apparent that personal and group learning outcomes were evident to varying degrees, suggesting that stakeholder participation was relatively successful. However, our analysis suggests that flexibility exists within such structures, allowing reflexive reconstitution to further increase social learning. Recommendations for future stakeholder participation are proposed, providing lessons for both UK flood governance and similar flood risk management processes in other countries.

The need to understand the scope for comparative lesson-drawing on national-level climate mitigation policy has acquired added significance due to the current impasse in international-level governance. Greater policy learning or lesson-drawing among peers at the national level could, to an extent, foster meaningful developments by overcoming generalised international apathy and inaction. In this respect, we analyse the features of one significant example of national climate policy in order to examine the scope for lesson-drawing, thereby setting out a normative research agenda. The UK Climate Change Act 2008 remains one of the few examples of legally enshrined national mitigation legislation and hence provides a relevant, but surprisingly under-researched, source of learning for policy-makers worldwide. By analysing its development, critical features and implementation, this article shows that-despite criticism of the sustainability and implementation effectiveness of the Act-some aspects of the policy could provide lessons for other states, and hence are potentially transferable extraterritorially, although lesson-drawing itself is conditional on contextual constraints. © the Authors 2014. The Political Quarterly © the Political Quarterly Publishing Co. Ltd. 2014.

Federal theories are once again enjoying renewed interest within European Union studies, where they potentially have multiple uses, including shedding more light on the enduringly puzzling issue of task allocation. Yet their overtly rationalist nature means that they may underestimate the contingent and socially constructed nature of integration principles and norms. One recent theory that tries to adopt a more socially nuanced explanation of task allocation is cryptofederalism. This article further develops its central arguments by adding insights drawn from social constructivism, then applying them to the animal welfare sector - a deeply controversial policy area where task allocation has always proven difficult to explain. It reveals that, once 'retooled', cryptofederalism adds a new but incomplete dimension to federal accounts of task allocation. Several scenarios of the potential future relationship between federalism and constructivism are then explored with respect to the changing 'mosaic' of European integration theory. © 2014 the Author(s) JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This paper provides insights into effective transboundary water governance by considering a case study of the Lake Victoria Basin East Africa. We argue that the construction of a well-designed ontology presents an explicit understanding of the target world shared among people. The paper adopts a 'sustainability science' perspective based on ontology engineering: a problem solving approach focusing on knowledge structuring of problem and process factors accompanied by supportive thinking. Its premise is that transboundary water regimes ought to fashion a public order that advances human dignity. The results indicate that the Lake Victoria basin regime is an 'interplay' of international and regional activities. Activities at the international level had greater influence on regional activities. This analysis identifies gaps in the basin regime creation process. The findings suggest that process factors rather than problem factors dominated the creation of the basin regime. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Several attempts have been made to explain the formation of collaborative watershed partnerships-that is, multi-actor groups which work together to resolve environmental problems at a watershed scale. But to what extent do these explanations 'travel' from their original home - namely the USA - to other jurisdictions, where similar claims are being made about the rise of collaborative environmental governance? to that end, this article critically evaluates how well one leading theory, namely the political contracting framework (PCF), explains their emergence in the rather different institutional context of the United Kingdom. Drawing on a survey of collaborative watershed practices, it argues that they are functionally equivalent to partnerships. Furthermore, when suitably amended, the PCF explains many important aspects of their emergence. The same critical factors are associated with their development, but these should now be assessed across the entire 'life-cycle' of partnerships. The implications of these findings are identified and explored, the underlying aim being to inform a much more comparative theoretical approach to understanding what appear to be important changes in collaborative environmental governance practices. © 2012.

The European Union's (EU) role in determining the overall goals and targets of environmental policy is widely understood. In contrast, the choices that underlie the patterns of policy instrument use have not been subjected to nearly as much analysis, even though the ability to select instruments constitutes the very essence of governing. This chapter explores what the (non) use of certain instruments in one important subarea of policy (i.e. climate change) reveals about the EU's capacity to function as a policy state. It confirms that the EU's role is stronger in relation to the determination of objectives than the instruments to achieve them. If one is looking for examples of policy makers 'governing by multiple instruments' one should focus on national policy systems. There are conditions in which the EU is willing to actively explore and even adopt nonregulatory instruments, but they seem to appear relatively episodically. For various reasons, regulation seems very likely to remain the instrument of choice in EU environmental policy.

It is a truism that environmental management has experienced a significant change in the locus of governing, in which centralised forms of steering have been gradually replaced by more collaborative management approaches organised at the ecosystem scale. Whereas much research capital has been expended on informing their design and promoting their uptake, surprisingly little systematic comparative empirical research exists on the precise nature and extent of what is often described as a 'paradigm shift' in governing. We address this gap by examining how one issue often deemed to require deeper 'collaboration', namely, catchment management, has been addressed in three comparable federal political systems: the European Union; the USA; and Australia. On the basis of a fresh and more comparable account of the forms and modalities of collaboration, we reveal that, although collaboration has undoubtedly grown in recent decades, its depth and extent remains highly variable both across and within the three cases. We also examine what these subtly different geographical 'contours of collaboration' imply for future research and practice.

Both nonstatutory community-based catchment management groups and existing statutory groups seek effective environmental management characterised by public participation, collaborative working and decentralised modes of assessment, planning and decision making. The characteristics and challenges of catchment management for water resources and protection of water quality require such approaches, and an expansion of both community-based and state-led initiatives has been evident in the United Kingdom. Available information about these developments is, however, limited and this paper reports survey findings of such initiatives, providing a mid-to-late 2009 'snapshot' of the situation in England and Wales. Catchment management groups are profiled in terms of size, organisational structure, membership, financing, technology transfer, policy influence and other outcomes. The results are interpreted with reference to a growing international literature, the potential sustainability, effectiveness and impact of groups and environmental governance challenges, including those posed by the European Union Water Framework Directive. © 2011 the Authors. Water and Environment Journal © 2011 CIWEM.

More and more scholars are revisiting federal theories in an attempt to explain the functioning of the EU. Yet in-depth empirical testing of their claims remains surprisingly limited. Cooperative federalism represents one particularly promising variant of federal theory in this respect. This article extends and refines existing claims about its utility to show how EU policy-making can be fruitfully conceived of as a multi-level 'cooperative game' played out between different actor coalitions. It then uses these arguments to analyse task allocation - a critical indicator of the European integration process - within the environmental sector. Drawing on fresh empirical evidence, it demonstrates how differential patterns of task allocation have emerged from a series of interlinked 'cooperative' dynamics, which were in turn shaped by broader federal structures. Although greater testing and development is needed, it concludes that there are good reasons to add cooperative federalism to the evolving 'tool-kit' of EU integration theory. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

Over the last decade, policy transfer has emerged as an important concept within public policy analysis, guiding both theoretical and empirical research spanning many venues and issue areas. Using Dolowitz and Marsh's 1996 stocktake as its starting point, this article reviews what has been learned by whom and for what purpose. It finds that the literature has evolved from its rather narrow, state-centred roots to cover many more actors and venues. While policy transfer still represents a niche topic for some researchers, an increasing number have successfully assimilated it into wider debates on topics such as globalisation, Europeanisation and policy innovation. This article assesses the concept's position in the overall 'tool-kit' of policy analysis, examines some possible future directions and reflects on their associated risks and opportunities. © 2011 the Authors. Political Studies Review © 2011 Political Studies Association.

Conflicts over how to "scale" policy-making tasks have characterized environmental governance since time immemorial. They are particularly evident in the area of water policy and raise important questions over the democratic legitimacy, economic efficiency and effectiveness of allocating (or "scaling") tasks to some administrative levels as opposed to others. This article adopts a comparative federalism perspective to assess the "optimality" of scaling-either upward or downward-in one issue area, namely coastal recreational water quality. It does so by comparing the scaling of recreational water quality tasks in the European Union (EU) and Australia. It reveals that the two systems have adopted rather different approaches to scaling and that this difference can partly be accounted for in federal theoretical terms. However, a much greater awareness of the inescapably political nature of scaling processes is nonetheless required. Finally, some words of caution are offered with regard to transferring policy lessons between these two jurisdictions. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

Policy transfer and its analogous term lesson drawing have received widespread and continuing attention in the public policy literature. To date, most theoretical and analytical approaches have centred on exploring the characteristics or mechanics of policy transfer, or promoting this concept as a normative project for improving policy-making. Surprisingly less attention has been given to systematically theorising the actual constraints on this process despite inherent and widely recorded difficulties with undertaking policy transfer in practice. This paper therefore reviews the policy transfer literature to draw out critical constraints, classifying them according to their position in the transfer process: demand-side constraints; programmatic constraints; contextual constraints; and, application constraints. One feature of the literature to date is how these constraints have primarily been related to 'hard' policy transfer, peer-to-peer between national governments. This paper therefore begins to examine how constraints for 'soft' policy transfer manifest themselves across the increasingly multi-levelled, collaborative and networked political landscape of contemporary governance; under the wire of national government control. Further development of this theoretical framework could aid the assessment of policies/lessons for potential transfer.

In this article we analyse the provisions of the European Union (EU) Lishon (Reform) Treaty and try to predict their future impacts on EU environmental governance. The Treaty could, if and when ratified, introduce changes to the EU's general principles and objectives, competences, institutions and policy procedures that may have a significant bearing on future patterns of environmental law and policy-making in the EU. But previous experience suggests that Treaty amendments tend to be "obligationally incomplete". that is subject to extensive post-treaty interpretation and contestation. Consequently, it may take many years for the full impacts of the new Treaty to reveal themselves should ratification ever be completed.

After a long period in the doldrums, in recent years the use of federalism to understand the European Union (EU) has undergone something of a renaissance. However, some of its core claims remain ambiguous and many have not been tested empirically. This paper argues that amongst a number of truth claims made by federal theorists, potentially the most illuminating is that relating to the allocation of decision-making powers (or tasks) across different levels of governance. In testing the value of what appears to be an increasingly distinct 'turn' in EU scholarship, it subjects this particular claim to empirical testing within the area of environmental governance - a policy area which is especially well suited to federal theory. Drawing on three relevant federal theories, this paper concludes that each one sheds new light on task allocation, but all have their blind spots, suggesting the need for further refinement, empirical testing and possibly synthesis with other theoretical approaches.

The UK government has identified the land-use planning system, and development plans in particular, as potentially powerful instruments for integrating national sustainability objectives into strategic decision making at local levels. One method for achieving this is through the use of so-called 'sustainability appraisals', which are an extension of the established system of environmental appraisal used by planners since the early 1990s. A national framework is outlined in Planning Policy Guidance Note 12. Local authorities are now expected to conduct an environmental appraisal of their development plans which covers sustainable development issues. However, little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of current guidance in meeting this aim. By evaluating the implementation of sustainability appraisals nationally, this paper suggests that while government advice to appraise is generally being applied, the actual use of key sustainability principles in practice is rather variable. It then discusses these findings in relation to the changing context of appraisals in the UK and other national planning systems. © 2004 University of Newcastle upon Tyne.