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Stimulus spending to address the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to either facilitate the transition away from fossil energy or to lock in carbon-intensive technologies and infrastructure for decades to come. Whether they are focused on green sectors or not, stimulus measures can alleviate or reinforce socio-economic inequality. This Element delves into the data in the Energy Policy Tracker to assess the extent to which energy policies adopted during the pandemic will expedite decarbonization and explores whether governments address inequities through policies targeted to disadvantaged, marginalized and underserved individuals and communities. The overall finding is that the recovery has not been sufficiently green or just. Nevertheless, a small number of policies aim to advance distributive justice and provide potential models for policymakers as they continue to attempt to 'build back better'. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Human societies increasingly interact with processes on a geological or even cosmic timescale. Despite this recognition, we still lack a basic understanding of these interconnections and how they translate into politics. This Element provides an exploration and systematization of 'the politics of deep time' as a novel lens of planetary politics in three steps. First, it demonstrates why deep-time interactions render the politics of deep time essential; second, it asks how deep time should be politicized and third, it explicates the politics of deep time by examining representative cases. The Element also formulates a conceptual framework to open up possibilities for alliances that seek to better understand and realize the politics of deep time, pioneering a debate on how planetary temporalities can be politically institutionalized. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Learning is critical for our capacity to govern the environment and adapt proactively to complex and emerging environmental issues. Yet, underlying barriers can challenge our capacity for learning in environmental governance. As a result, we often fail to adequately understand pressing environmental problems or produce innovative and effective solutions. This Element synthesizes insights from extensive academic and applied research on learning around the world to inform both research and practice. We distill the social and structural features of governance to help researchers and practitioners better understand, diagnose, and support learning and more adaptive responses to environmental problems.
Homeostatic Control of Brain Function offers a broad view of brain health and diverse perspectives for potential treatments, targeting key areas such as mitochondria, the immune system, epigenetic changes, and regulatory molecules such as ions, neuropeptides, and neuromodulators. Loss of homeostasis becomes expressed as a diverse array of neurological disorders. Each disorder has multiple comorbidities - with some crossing over several conditions - and often disease-specific treatments remain elusive. When current pharmacological therapies result in ineffective and inadequate outcomes, therapies to restore and maintain homeostatic functions can help improve brain health, no matter the diagno...
Abortion and Democracy offers critical analyses of abortion politics in Latin America’s Southern Cone, with lessons and insights of wider significance. Drawing on the region’s recent history of military dictatorship and democratic transition, this edited volume explores how abortion rights demands fit with current democratic agendas. With a focus on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, the book’s contributors delve into the complex reality of abortion through the examination of the discourses, strategies, successes, and challenges of abortion rights movements. Assembling a multiplicity of voices and experiences, the contributions illuminate key dimensions of abortion rights struggles: health...
An overview of the forms of agency in urban climate politics, including their strengths, limitations and the power dynamics between them. Written by renowned scholars from around the globe, it is ideal for researchers and practitioners working in the area of urban climate politics and governance.
Science and technological innovation wield unfathomable power in the shaping of social life and the environment. Yet, the democratic control and shaping of technology remains at best an unfinished project, not least due to dominant paradigms of governance implicitly that have historically delegated the good to market forces. This Element explores responsible innovation as an emergent discourse in governing science and society relations. Specifically, it explores the making of responsible innovation through three lenses: first, as a way of reconfiguring the concept of responsibility in science governance with far-reaching implications for scientific culture and practice; second, as a way of injecting agency through deliberative methods aimed at anticipating and deliberating upon the kinds of possible worlds that science and technology bring into being; and third, as a framework for governing innovation sensitive to the dynamics of specific technologies and to the particular socio-political context in which innovation develops.
Explores the significance of the Anthropocene for environmental politics, analysing political concepts in view of contemporary environmental challenges.
An authoritative analysis of [a decade of] research on institutional architectures in earth system governance, covering key elements, structures and policy options.
Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems is not straightforward. Pursuing institutional improvement is an intensely political process, playing out over extended timeframes, and intricately tied to existing setups. Such activities are open-ended, and outcomes are often provisional and indeterminate. The question of institutional improvement, therefore, centers on understanding how institutions are (re)made within complex settings. This Element develops an original analytical foundation for studying institutional remaking and its political dynamics. It explains how institutional remaking can be observed and provides a typology comprising five areas of institutional production involved in institutional remaking (Novelty, Uptake, Dismantling, Stability, Interplay). This opens up a new research agenda on the politics of responding to institutional breakdown, and brings sustainability scholarship into closer dialogue with scholarship on processes of institutional change and development. Also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.