Expert engagement in participatory processes: translating stakeholder discourses into policy options

This paper demonstrates an innovative role for experts in supporting participatory policy processes with an application to landslide risk management in the Italian town of Nocera Inferiore. Experts co-produce risk mitigation options based on their specialized knowledge taking account of local knowledge and values by directly coupling stakeholder discourses with option design. Drawing on the theory of plural rationality and based on a literature review, interviews and a public questionnaire, stakeholder discourses are elicited on the landslide risk problem and its solution. Armed with the discourses and in close interaction with stakeholders, experts provide a range of technical mitigation options, each within a given budget constraint. These options are subsequently deliberated in the participatory process with the intent of reaching compromise recommendations for landslide risk mitigation. As we show in an accompanying paper, “Compromise not consensus. Designing a participatory process for landslide risk mitigation” (this issue), the provision of multiple co-produced policy options enhances stakeholder deliberation by respecting legitimate differences in values and worldviews.

     

Putting stakeholder engagement in its place: how situating public participation in community improves natural resource management outcomes

Stakeholders in natural resource management decisions are also multifaceted individuals and members of communities; as such, they bring complex histories, experiences, values, aspirations, and relationships to public participation processes. When these processes fail to take this social context into account, multiple problems can result, including a perceived lack of process trustworthiness; perceived focus on issues that seem immaterial or irrelevant; failure to equitably represent and take account of diverse voices; and failure to engage participants in productive dialogue. In this article we evaluate the Community Voice Method (CVM) as a way of addressing those problems by better situating public participation in place. CVM is a mixed-method approach to public participation in which stakeholders are interviewed and the interview data is presented through a film, which is then screened at public meetings to catalyze dialogue. We draw on 14 years of CVM projects addressing natural resource management issues in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. Through an overview of nine projects and their results, and more in-depth consideration of three, we elucidate how this method fosters trustworthy, relevant, representative, and productive public participation that has resulted in community capacity-building, institutional capacity-building, and stakeholder-guided policymaking.

     

Gender, geography and policy: the conundrums of engagement

This paper contemplates the relationship between the discipline of geography, and the making of public policy. It is particularly concerned with the compatibilities and incompatibilities of the nature of academic knowledge production and public policy development. As such, we contribute to an ongoing debate among geographers regarding whether and how they should engage with policy, and utilize examples from our involvement in the Metropolis Project, a Canadian initiative based on interdisciplinary research networks linked to government and public service agencies involved in immigrant settlement. We argue ultimately that geographers do need to engage politically with policymaking, but that the manner in which to do this is never straightforward, but rather takes place across institutional, ideological, and political landscapes that are perpetually shifting. Finally we suggest some helpful tools from feminist methodologies with which to approach policy-related issues.     

Pollution in Taihu Lake China: causal chain and policy options analyses

Taihu Lake is located at the densely populated region of the eastern coast of China. Taihu Basin is one of the most developed regions of China. Over the past decades, especially since the reforming and opening-up of China in 1980s, the lake has received more and more pressure from a variety of interlinked human activities, including industrial pollution, fertilizer and pesticide application, eutrophication, overfishing, etc. Water quality has been deteriorating sharply in the lake. In this paper, we made a comprehensive assessment of the environmental and socio-economic issues to affect Taihu Lake ecosystem health. Pollution was identified as the most serious environmental concern. The root causes of these environmental problems are recognized to be diverse, including dense population, high urbanization, heavy industrialization, fast economic development, insufficient sewage treatment, weak public awareness of environment conservation, and lack of institutional capacity and insufficient enforcement through regulations and legislation. On the policy part, past and current policies and measures are reviewed, especially the “Zero” discharge action and phosphate ban in detergents in Taihu Basin. In order to mitigate environmental problems, some further policy options have been proposed, including: improving the fishery management; strengthening cross- provincial collaboration; making efforts to reduce flood disaster and increasing investment to new environmental protection technologies. It is important to assess the economic, social and environmental values of natural resources (soil, water and organisms) in order to allocate them efficiently and fairly between the present and future generations.     

Political economy of the energy-groundwater nexus in India: exploring issues and assessing policy options

Indian agriculture is trapped in a complex nexus of groundwater depletion and energy subsidies. This nexus is the product of past public policy choices that initially offered opportunities to India’s small-holder-based irrigation economy but has now generated in its wake myriad economic, social, and environmental distortions. Conventional ‘getting-the-price-right’ solutions to reduce these distortions have consistently been undermined by the invidious political economy that the nexus has created. The historical evolution of the nexus is outlined, the nature and scale of the distortions it has created are explored, and alternative approaches which Indian policy makers can use to limit, if not eliminate, the damaging impacts of the distortions, are analysed.     

The green economy in Tanzania: From global discourses to institutionalization

The purpose of this paper is to examine the transfer of the green economy from a global discursive level to institutionalization at the national level in Tanzania. While there is a growing amount of research discussing technological aspects of the green economy, less attention has been paid to policy implications and governance aspects, especially in developing countries. There is an increasing emphasis on technological and market-based solutions to environmental challenges globally and in the developed part of the world. However, in developing countries, ‘green growth’ often implies transformed control over natural resources – under schemes that are often driven from abroad. Over the last five to ten years, investments aimed at increasing productivity in the rural agricultural sector in developing countries have become a focus area of the green economy, but various concepts of green have become confused. Such (mis-) interpretation of the green economy has consequences for implementation and outcomes of various ‘green’ projects. Drawing on governmentality as well as the concept of institutional bricolage, I examine how the green economy discourse and policy at the global level have been re-shaped and re-interpreted to fit the existing agri-business initiative of the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), which has been championed as a model for green economy implementation in Africa. I discuss how the green discourse has been ‘grabbed’ as an opportunity to ‘greenwash’ SAGCOT in its establishment and institutionalization.     

Peridotite-chromitite complexes in the Eastern Desert of Egypt: Insight into Neoproterozoic sub-arc mantle processes

The Neoproterozoic peridotite-chromitite complexes in the Central Eastern Desert of Egypt, being a part of the Arabian-Nubian Shield, are outcropped along the E–W trend from Wadi Sayfayn, Wadi Bardah, and Jabal Al-Faliq to Wadi Al-Barramiyah, from east to west. Their peridotites are completely serpentinized, and the abundance of bastite after orthopyroxene suggests harzburgite protoliths with subordinate dunites, confirmed by low contents of Al₂O₃, CaO and clinopyroxene (< 3 vol%) in bulk peridotites. The primary olivine is Fo89.3–Fo92.6, and the residual clinopyroxene (Cpx) in serpentinites contains, on average, 1.1 wt% Al₂O₃, 0.7 wt% Cr₂O₃, and 0.2 wt% Na₂O, similar in chemistry to that in Izu-Bonin-Marian forearc peridotites. The wide range of spinel Cr-number [Cr/(Cr + Al)], 0.41–0.80, with low TiO₂ (0.03 wt%), MnO (0. 3 wt%) and Y_Fe [(Fe^3 +/(Cr + Al + Fe^3 +) = 0.03 on average)] for the investigated harzburgites-dunites is similar to spinel compositions for arc-related peridotites. The partial melting degrees of Bardah and Sayfayn harzburgites range mainly from 20 to 25% and 25 to 30% melting, respectively; this is confirmed by whole-rock chemistry and Cpx HREE modelling (~ 20% melting). The Barramiyah peridotite protoliths are refractory residues after a wide range of partial melting, 25–40%, where more hydrous fluids are available from the subducting slab. The Neoproterozoic mantle heterogeneity is possibly ascribed mainly to the wide variations of partial melting degrees in small-scale areas, slab-derived inputs and primordial mantle compositions. The Sayfayn chromitites were possibly crystallized from island-arc basaltic melts, followed by crystallization of Barramiyah chromitites from boninitic melt in the late stage of subduction. The residual Cpx with a spoon-shape REE pattern is rich in both LREE and fluid-mobile elements (e.g., Pb, B, Li, Ba, Sr), but poor in HFSE (e.g., Ta, Nb, Zr, Th), similar to Cpx in supra-subduction zone (SSZ) settings, where slab-fluid metasomatism is a prevalent agent. The studied chromitites and their host peridotites represent a fragment of sub-arc mantle, and originated in an arc-related setting. The systematic increase in the volume of chromitite pods with the increasing of their host-peridotite thickness from Northern to Southern Eastern Desert suggests that the thickness of wall rocks is one factor controlling the chromitite size. The factors controlling the size of Neoproterozoic chromitite pods are the thickness, beside the composition, of the host refractory peridotites, compositions and volumes of the supplied magmas, the amount of slab-derived fluids, and possibly the partial melting degree of the host peridotites.     

A glimpse into rapid freezing processes in clay with x-ray tomography

Acta Geotechnica - This short paper proposes time-series x-ray tomography as a valuable tool for quantifying freezing processes in a remoulded clay. As an example, three simple closed system...     

River dissolved and solid loads in the Lesser Antilles: New insight into basalt weathering processes

We present here the first available estimations of chemical weathering and associated atmospheric CO₂ consumption rates as well as mechanical erosion rate for the Lesser Antilles. The chemical weathering (100–120 t/km²/year) and CO₂ consumption (1.1–1.4 × 10⁶ mol/km²/year) rates are calculated after subtraction of the atmospheric and hydrothermal inputs in the chemical composition of the river dissolved loads. These rates thus reflect only the low-temperature basalt weathering. Mechanical erosion rates (approx. 800–4000 t/km²/year) are estimated by a geochemical mass balance between the dissolved and solid loads and mean unaltered rock. The calculated chemical weathering rates and associated atmospheric CO₂ consumption rates are among the highest values worldwide but are still lower than those of other tropical volcanic islands and do not fit with the HCO₃⁻ concentration vs. 1/T correlation proposed by Dessert et al. (2001). The thick soils and explosive volcanism context of the Lesser Antilles are the two possible keys to this different weathering behaviour; the development of thick soils limits the chemical weathering and the presence of very porous pyroclastic flows allows an important water infiltration and thus subsurface weathering mechanisms, which are less effective for atmospheric CO₂ consumption.     

After the consent: Re-imagining participatory land governance in Massingir,Mozambique

Massingir district is located in southern Mozambique, bordering South Africa. From the mid-2000s onwards, foreign private and domestic investments in the district have been on the rise in the agribusiness, tourism, and conservation sectors. This has resulted in events that scholars and activists have come to describe as land, water, and green grabs. The on-going discussions have urged the government to fully implement the policy and legal frameworks that oblige investors to undertake community consultations based on the principle of Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) and to safeguard the communities’ land right acquisition. However, little has been clarified about how the consulted communities actually have experienced the consequences of their consent after they agreed to resettle or to concede parts of their communally managed land to investors. This article elaborates on a case study of a community resettled from the Limpopo National Park in Massingir and the neighboring community, which, after struggling to secure land and to improve their livelihood, began to reflect on their initial consent, interact with various actors, and craft strategies for expressing dissent and re-negotiating the deal they had struck. The article argues that the current emphasis on consultation for the purposes of building consent overlooks the importance of paying systemic attention to these strategies that are emerging from the community’s everyday experiences with the consequences of their act of giving consent. Inclusive land governance entails an institutional mechanism that closely responds to people’s experiences with policy practices.     

Environmental justice as subtext or omission: Examining discourses of anti-incineration campaigning in Ireland

The incineration of waste is a controversial issue marked by a history of opposition from community groups and environmentalists around the globe. Opponents, particularly in the USA, have frequently adopted a discourse of environmental justice to challenge the legitimacy of incineration. In line with these broad geographies of resistance recent proposals to introduce municipal solid waste incinerators in Ireland have sparked a series of opposition campaigns. However an examination of the discourses of resistance adopted by campaigners in one specific site of resistance, the Galway region on the west coast of Ireland, indicates that the vocabulary of environmental justice has not been publicly articulated. This paper investigates this absence of environmental justice in the language of opposition. The research reveals an interwoven set of contingent conditions that conspire to inhibit the adoption of environmental justice discourses in Ireland. However these conditions are not static and a combination of pressures, both within and beyond Ireland, are creating a dynamic context that could promote the emergence of environmental justice discourses in the future.     

Issues in public policy evaluation: the case of regional policy

This paper notes the recent growth of public policy evaluation studies and pays particular attention to those policies with avowed spatial objectives. It seeks to establish the general nature of these diverse studies and their relationship to geographical analysis. A case study examining the evaluation of regional policy in the U.K. is used to demonstrate the nature of the issues in public policy evaluation and to explore the role of geography in the rapidly growing domain, known most commonly as ‘policy analysis’.     

Fractures and faults in volcanic rocks (Campi Flegrei,southern Italy): insight into volcano-tectonic processes

The present study was focused to analyze fractures and faults in the Campi Flegrei calderas presently hosting several volcanic edifices, such as lava domes, scoria, and tuff cones. A complex network of fractures and faults affects the volcanic rocks, mostly as planar with highly variable density. Frequently faults appearing as conjugate structures showing normal kinematics often associated with ductile deformation such as drag folds and deflexed layers, suggesting a syn-eruption deformation. However, the most of faults, mainly hosted along the caldera/crater rims, are very steep with dominant normal and secondary reverse movements. The fracture pattern indicates a slight prevalence of NE–SW and NW–SE directions, but N–S and E–W trends also occur. Fractures and faults found in rocks older than 15 ka (Neapolitan Yellow Tuff included), measured in western and eastern sectors of the study area, indicate a rotation of ca. 30° of the main directions among these two sectors. For the faults occurring along the caldera/crater rims, we suggest a kinematic evolution characterized by the reactivation of tensile fractures previously formed in response to both regional extension and locale resurgent dome. Finally, normal faults located in the central sector of caldera, between La Starza and Accademia localities, cutting the youngest volcanic deposits, indicate a constant NNE–SSW extension probably related to the caldera resurgence.     

重力条件下粗糙裂隙溶蚀过程的可视化试验研究

岩体裂隙的溶蚀现象广泛存在于自然过程和工程实践,重力对溶蚀过程具有重要作用。可视化观测技术是研究粗糙裂隙溶蚀机理的关键手段,然而传统的可视化技术存在裂隙粗糙壁面难以复制、溶蚀过程难以实时观测等问题。通过自主研发的粗糙裂隙溶蚀过程可视化试验平台,开展了垂直裂隙和水平裂隙在4种流量条件(0.05,0.1,0.3,1 mL/min)下的溶蚀可视化实验,研究了重力效应对溶蚀模式和溶蚀形态的影响,采用分形维数量化了不同溶蚀模式的形态学特征,最终确定了不同佩克莱数(Pe)条件下的突破时注液量。试验结果表明：在Pe≤62.1范围内,重力效应对溶蚀模式具有重要影响,垂直裂隙中的溶蚀发育为浮力主导模式和通道模式,重力效应将诱发单一、集中的溶蚀通道;而水平裂隙则统一发育为开度演变均匀、宽度较大的通道,即经典的虫洞溶蚀模式;在Pe数较大时(Pe=207.0)时,垂直裂隙和水平裂隙中的溶蚀均发育为均匀溶蚀。试验结果还证实了垂直裂隙更易发育为贯通的溶蚀通道,从而加速溶蚀突破;Pe=20.7时为最优注入条件,垂直裂隙的突破时注液量最小。在此条件下,垂直裂隙的突破时注液量仅为水平裂隙的1/4。建议重点关注重力效应对...     

Logging interpretation taking into account hydrodynamical and geomechanical processes in an invaded zone

The problem of interpretation of geophysical data taking into account hydrodynamical and geo-mechanical processes in oil-drilling wells is considered. The effects emerging due to change of porosity and permeability are studied, and the influence of such effects on the geophysical measurements in a borehole is analyzed on the basis of characteristic parameters of the Kogalym oilfield reservoirs.     

Intrusions and exclusions: Democratization in Thailand in the context of environmental discourses and resource conflicts*

This article sketches the process of democratization in Thailand, focusing on shifting relations between civil society and state actors. Environmental discourse and conflicts about natural resources, specifically forests, during the last two decades, have been one of the main fields of social controversy and change. In the context of these controversies, civil society actors, in resistance to and alliance with state agencies, drove forward democratization by intruding into power domains of the state. State agents, increasingly forced to justify their actions according to democratic norms in the expanding space of public debate, had to search for allies and majorities within civil society. The successful establishment of public debate as an integral part of political decision making, on the one hand, resulted in a diversification of civil society, on the other hand, forced powerful segments of society to organize and defend their interests within the new public political space. Strategies of exclusion, referring to nationalism and ethnicism, have become an important instrument to secure positions and power, threatened in the process of democratization and emancipation of discriminated social groups.     

Climate change impacts in Romania: Vulnerability and adaptation options

Using the output from five climate model experiments (four equilibrium GCMs and one transient GCM) for a double carbon dioxide atmospheric concentration, the climate change scenarios in Romania for a time slice up to 2075 were constructed. These scenarios were used to assess the climate change impacts on different resource sectors: agricultural crops, forests, and water resources. The vulnerability of each sector and specific adaptation options were then analysed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Mafic magmas from Mount Baker in the northern Cascade arc,Washington: probes into mantle and crustal processes

Five mafic lava flows located on the southern flank of Mount Baker are among the most primitive in the volcanic field. A comprehensive dataset of whole rock and mineral chemistry reveals the diversity of these mafic lavas that come from distinct sources and have been variably affected by ascent through the crust. Disequilibrium textures present in all of the lavas indicate that crustal processes have affected the magmas. Despite this evidence, mantle source characteristics have been retained and three primitive endmember lava types are represented. These include (1) modified low-K tholeiitic basalt (LKOT-like), (2) typical calc-alkaline (CA) lavas, and (3) high-Mg basaltic andesite and andesite (HMBA and HMA). The Type 1 endmember, the basalt of Park Butte (49.3–50.3 wt% SiO₂, Mg# 64–65), has major element chemistry similar to LKOT found elsewhere in the Cascades. Park Butte also has the lowest overall abundances of trace elements (with the exception of the HREE), indicating it is either derived from the most depleted mantle source or has undergone the largest degree of partial melting. The Type 2 endmember is represented by the basalts of Lake Shannon (50.7–52.6 wt% SiO₂, Mg# 58–62) and Sulphur Creek (51.2–54.6 wt% SiO₂, Mg# 56–57). These two lavas are comparable to calc-alkaline rocks found in arcs worldwide and have similar trace element patterns; however, they differ from each other in abundances of REE, indicating variation in degree of partial melting or fractionation. The Type 3 endmember is represented by the HMBA of Tarn Plateau (51.8–54.0 wt% SiO₂, Mg# 68–70) and the HMA of Glacier Creek (58.3–58.7 wt% SiO₂, Mg# 63–64). The strongly depleted HREE nature of these Type 3 units and their decreasing Mg# with increasing SiO₂ suggests fractionation from a high-Mg basaltic parent derived from a source with residual garnet. Another basaltic andesite unit, Cathedral Crag (52.2–52.6 wt% SiO₂, Mg# 55–58), is an Mg-poor differentiate of the Type 3 endmember. The calc-alkaline lavas are least enriched in a subduction component (lowest H₂O, Sr/P_N, and Ba/Nb), the LKOT-like lavas are intermediate (moderate Sr/P_N and Ba/Nb), and the HMBA are most enriched (highest H₂O, Sr/P_N and Ba/Nb). The generation of the LKOT-like and calc-alkaline lavas can be successfully modeled by partial melting of a spinel lherzolite with variability in composition of slab flux and/or mantle source depletion. The HMBA lavas can be successfully modeled by partial melting of a garnet lherzolite with slab flux compositionally similar to the other lava types, or less likely by partial melting of a spinel lherzolite with a distinctly different, HREE-depleted slab flux.