This thesis comprises three essays on environmental economics and deals with issues such as corruption, emissions leakage and green alliances. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between corruption and market entry. We show that corruption incentivises firms' entry in the market while an increased number of firms incentivises bureaucrats to be corrupt, in a self-reinforcing manner. Although the applicability of the model can be more general, we focus on the case of environmental regulation and show the positive relationship between corruption and pollution though market entry. In the second chapter, an additional factor which leads to emissions leakage is proposed. In a setting with two countries, when consumers in one country care only about domestic emissions, emissions leakage arises since demand for the good that is produced in that country using a greener technology is shifted abroad where production takes place with the dirtiest technology. Next, I consider the global environmental consciousness scenario i.e., consumers in that country now care about both the domestic and foreign emissions. In this case, foreign pollution is mitigated and leakage is diminished. In the last chapter, I examine green alliances, the partnerships between a firm and an environmental group. In this model, the environmentalists have two options: to either act against the firm which implies shrinking the demand that the firm faces or join forces with it by reducing the cost of implementing a greener technology. The group's decision is affected by an environmental tax set by the government and by extension it impacts firm's choices on output and emission intensity. It is shown that higher taxation makes the conflict scenario more likely to happen, implying that collaboration and a more stringent environmental policy are substitutes. This identifies a previously unexplored, possibly adverse effect of public policy on environmental quality.

The Aral Sea regression is globally famous as a devastating ecological disaster, though recently a dam has led to the partial restoration of the North Aral. These ecological changes have overlapped with the collapse of the USSR and resultant political-economic transformations. From ethnographic fieldwork in Aral’sk and fishing villages, and archival research, I argue that the sea’s regression and partial return cannot be analytically separated from political-economic processes of socialism and postsocialism. This study of the entanglements of environmental and political-economic change has, I suggest, implications for anthropological engagements with climate change. Chapter 1 offers narratives of Soviet irrigation policies (which caused the regression) and of the construction of a socialist fishery, arguing that similar political-economic processes drove both. Chapter 2 explores official responses to the regression, especially importing ocean fish for processing in Aral’sk, and sending fishermen to fish elsewhere in Kazakhstan. Chapters 3 and 4 explore how these practices, and their cessation after the collapse of the USSR, shape local understandings of the regression. I thus decentre the environmental disaster narrative. Part 2 examines post-Soviet projects in the region, arguing that the disaster narrative, though partial, rallied actors and mobilised projects, including the dam, which have to some extent reshaped the region. Part 3 analyses the divergent outcomes of the sea’s return today. No longer embedded in the command economy, the sea is enmeshed in new sets of relations connecting fishermen, private actors, state and markets extending as far as Germany. Catch is limited, but over-quota fishing is widespread. For some fishing villages, this has led to new-found prosperity, with extensive ritual expenditure. However, because over-quota fish cannot be sold openly, they do not reach newly-opened factories in Aral’sk, where the sea is felt to be marginal and the fishing industry figures as a symbol of corruption.

Attitudes to nature vary between individuals, between cultures and over history. Human behaviour towards nature varies similarly and crudely can be characterised as ‘abusive’, ‘indifferent’ or ‘caring’. Attitudes in western societies currently appear to be more proenvironmental, yet the actual collective behaviour of humanity is unsustainable, potentially threatening our survival. Investigations into the epigenesis of pro-environmental behaviours are few, qualitative, and mainly study environmental educators. Potential antecedents to such behaviour are suggested to include ‘experiences of nature’, adult instruction, and both formal and informal education. In comparison, the antecedents of interpersonal pro-social patterns are increasingly well understood as a result of systematic psychological research: the emotional and motivational qualities of an attachment with the ‘primary caregiver’ (principally parental ‘attachment status’) have been demonstrated to make enduring prototypes for the qualities of other, later, relationships. In this study, a comprehensive, retrospective questionnaire, covering the environment and behaviour of childhood, parent-child relations, and the behaviour of parents in relation to the environment, as well as the present attitudes and behaviour toward nature of the respondent, was completed by 294 adult subjects from a variety of ‘nature relevant’ occupations including Biotechnologists, Conservation Bureaucrats, ‘Ecoradicals’, Students, Farmers and Foresters. Factor analysis demonstrated a modest correspondence between attachment to parents and behaviour toward nature, and showed that people do replicate certain parental environmental behaviours. However, much more potent antecedents of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours emerged. These were: unconstrained childhood exploration of nature, and modelling of easy familiarity with nature by a ‘nature mentor’, usually a parent. Vicarious experiences of nature, as from broadcast media, also appeared positively to influence attitudes and behaviour, but they result in a more ‘objectified’, less motivated, relationship, and were not a substitute for direct experience. Vocational choice was influenced by childhood nature experience. It is concluded that environmentalism may usefully be considered as composed of dimensions or components of three kinds: emotional, behavioural and cognitive. An emotionally secure relationship with nature, here termed ‘Attachment to Nature’, is hypothesised to be the most significant factor in the generation of committed proenvironmentalism, and a comparison to parent-child attachment theory is made. Outdoor recreation behaviour may prove to be a measure of this nature attachment, comparable with the ‘strange situation’ test of infants for parental attachment. As poor interhuman attachment is implicated in chaotic and abusive relationships, wider emotional and behavioural effects of separation from nature are probable, and may prefigure behavioural pathologies analogous to dissociative disorders, depression and violence. This remains to be rigorously investigated, as do detailed pathways to particular environmental values and behaviours for different personality types. The loss of access to the non-human inherent in the global tide of urbanisation may have long-term psychological costs, implying psycho-social sequelae significant for health, architectural, town planning, transport and economic policies. An ‘ecopsychological’ model of the present erosion and potential restoration of individual and collective psychological health in relation to nature is presented.

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This thesis contributes to the scholarship on policy diffusion in general, and on environmental policy diffusion in particular, by unpicking the drivers of different diffusion mechanisms. Its overarching aim is to investigate the motivational dynamics influencing environmental policymaking at the fuzzy, understudied, pre-legislative stage. The thesis comprises four standalone papers: The first paper (Chapter 2) examines policymakers’ motivations to engage with the climate change mitigation agenda based on a case study of Israeli climate change mitigation policy. It suggests that Israel’s engagement with the climate change mitigation agenda, displaying an evident pattern of diffusion by emulating developed countries, is significantly motivated by considerations of internal, rather than external, legitimacy, contrary to expectations. The second paper (Chapter 3) makes theoretical advancements in recognising issue attributes as explanatory factors for the different mechanisms of policy diffusion, addressing an acknowledged gap in the literature. The third paper (Chapter 4) is an empirical application of the issue attributes model introduced in Chapter 3; the concept is applied to three diffusion processes of environmental issues in Israel: climate change, air pollution, and waste, analysing the differences in the attributes of these three issues, and subsequently, the differences in diffusion mechanisms in practice. The fourth paper (Chapter 5) investigates GLOBE International, a previously unstudied network of legislators committed to advancing climate change legislation. Its main findings show that GLOBE facilitates a mechanism of policy and political learning, but perhaps more interestingly, generates network-enabled emotional energy and esprit de corps among its members, which has helped to motivate and sustain climate action by legislators. The thesis takes a qualitative, microlevel approach, utilising data from 64 interviews with policy actors from 21 countries, as well supporting textual sources, thus contributing to the qualitative knowledge base needed to support analytical aggregations on policy diffusion processes.

A fundamental challenge in biology is to understand how animals can respond to the unprecedented environmental changes caused by human activities. In aquatic systems, pollution and disturbance from anthropogenic activities often impacts upon the sensory environment, and affects a number of important fitness-related behaviours. This PhD focuses on how a degraded environment impacts the behavioural responses of fish. The first section (chapters 2, 3 and 4) examines whether a degraded visual environment immediately affects the aggregation behaviour of fish as prey, and explores the implications for fish as predators. The second section (chapters 5 and 6) considers the way that previous experiences of a degraded or variable environment shape behavioural responses. Together, the results highlight the importance of considering the relationship between environmental conditions and behaviour over different time spans and during different developmental stages in order to understand how fish may respond to anthropogenic environmental change. The first section offers new evidence on the ways that groups of fish respond to predators in turbid water, and how predators target individuals within those groups. In chapter 2, I investigate how shoals of guppies respond to a simulated aerial predator attack in increasing levels of turbidity. I find that, in turbid water, guppies form looser shoals, and alter their behaviour in response to a simulated attack by showing weaker escape manoeuvres and increasing freezing behaviour as opposed to darting escape manoeuvres. In chapter 3, I explore the ‘selfish herd movement’ rules that guppies use to form shoals in response to a predator attack in clear and turbid water. I find that guppies use more complex rules (moving towards a location determined by the position of multiple individuals) in clear water, resulting in large compact shoals. By comparison, guppies are unable to use these rules when forming groups in turbid water, resulting in smaller, more fragmented shoals. In chapter 4, I consider the effect of turbidity from the perspective of both predator and prey, in the context of the oddity effect. Firstly, I assess the effect of turbidity on how stickleback predators target Daphnia prey individuals of different sizes from within mixed groups. Secondly, I explore how turbidity influences the social choices made by sticklebacks. From the perspective of the predator, sticklebacks selected large bodied Daphnia from mixed groups more than expected by chance in clear water, but not in turbid water. From the perspective of the prey, large individuals lost their preference for size-matched shoalmates in turbid water, whereas small individuals showed no social preference in either clear or turbid water. The oddity effect appears weakened in turbid water, relaxing predation pressure on large odd individuals at the expense of small individuals. Together, these three chapters consider the immediate, flexible responses of both predator and prey to short-term changes in turbidity. The second section of the thesis explores the longer-term impacts of a degraded or variable environment on the behavioural responses of fish. In chapter 5, I investigate how adult guppies respond to different food cues (visual, olfactory, or a combination of both) with increasing levels of experience of a visually poor environment. Previous work rearing guppies under similar conditions found that individuals make a sensory switch from vision to olfaction. I find that, although guppies with more experience of a dark environment increase their foraging success in visually poor environments, they do not make a sensory switch from vision to olfaction as seen in juvenile fish. Finally, in chapter 6, I step away from the visual environment and look at how recent experience of a variable habitat combined with low or high food levels affects boldness and exploratory behaviour in guppies. While some behaviours are modified with experience of low food, for example, the time to attack a food item, I find that exploratory behaviour was not influenced by either energy state or experience of a variable environment, remaining remarkably stable over time. These final two chapters highlight the importance of investigating behavioural responses to the environment over different time spans and during different developmental stages.

Understanding climate change as a knowledge controversy, this thesis provides new insights into the form, value and impact of the climate change debate on science and policy processes. Based on 99 interviews in New Zealand and the United Kingdom as well as social network analysis, it provides an original contribution to knowledge by identifying previously unknown sites of knowledge contestation within the climate change debate, in addition to contributory factors, and potential solutions to, debate polarisation. It also addresses a fundamental gap in the literature regarding the impact of controversy on the production of scientific knowledge and policy decision-making. This thesis comprises five standalone papers (Chapters 2-6) which together explore climate change as a knowledge controversy using frameworks from science and technology studies, sociology and geography. Chapter 2 finds that the most central blogs within the climate sceptical blogosphere predominantly focus on the scientific element of the climate debate. It argues that by acting as an alternative public site of expertise, the blogosphere may be playing a central role in perpetuating doubt regarding the scientific basis for climate change policymaking. Chapter 3 suggests that the binary and dualistic format of labels used within the climate debate such as “denier” or “alarmist” contribute towards polarisation by reducing possibilities for constructive dialogue. Chapter 4 investigates rationales for debate participation and argues that identifying and emphasising commonalities between previously polarised individuals may serve to reduce antagonism within the climate change debate. Chapter 5 investigates the impact of controversy on the production of scientific knowledge and finds that climate scientists identify substantial impacts on their agency as scientists, but not on scientific practice. It argues that this distinction indicates that boundarymaking may be understood as a more active and explicit process under conditions of controversy. Finally, Chapter 6 introduces the concept of post-decisional logics of inaction, emphasising the role of place in determining the influence of controversial knowledge claims on climate change policymaking. These findings make explicit the underlying politics of knowledge inherent within the climate change debate, and emphasise the need for a more attentive consideration of the role of knowledge, place and performativity in contested science and policy environments.

Strawberry Hill, the Gothic villa and associated landscape, seat of Horace Walpole (1717-97), is without doubt mandatory in any assessment of eighteenth-century British architecture, yet the reasons for its creation have never been adequately explained or fully understood. This thesis asserts, for the first time, that Walpole’s ideas which informed Strawberry Hill are inspired by theories that stimulate ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ as articulated in essays by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) published in the Spectator (1712). The thesis argues that Walpole’s reasons for choosing Gothic have been misunderstood and that he valued this ‘true’ style of British architecture for its associative and imaginative connotations and as a means of expressing historical interpretation through material objects. It affirms that Strawberry Hill expressed the idea that it was based on monastic foundations using architectural quotations from Gothic tombs, representing visual links to historical figures and events. The thesis, moreover, develops an argument as to how Walpole’s theories expressed in Anecdotes of Painting (1762-71) and The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening (1780) became manifest at Strawberry Hill. Avoiding the straightforward architectural description of previous texts, the thesis demonstrates Strawberry Hill to be a sequence of theatrical spaces playing with scale, colour and atmosphere, specifically designed to create surprise and wonder in order to stimulate the imagination. A series of sensory effects and moods, based on contemporary landscape theory, create a background to Walpole’s collection of cultural and historical artefacts – each ‘singular,’ ‘unique,’ or ‘rare’ - artfully displayed to produce their own narrative. Unlike previous studies, the villa and landscape are evaluated as an entity, a structured essay in associative, imaginative thought. Finally, the dissertation reconstructs Strawberry Hill as it existed in Horace Walpole’s time, leading the reader on an integrative virtual tour of buildings, gardens, emblematic models and associative inspirations.

This thesis addresses a recurrent question of our time – whether democracy can secure environmental sustainability – by drawing on literatures in the normative theory of democracy, social choice theory and environmental politics. I propose a basic, yet substantial organising principle, the ‘dilemma of green democracy’, which maps out the possibility of realising green outcomes under democratic constraints. Interdisciplinary ideas from neighbouring disciplines are also imported for the purpose of studying the design of good environmental-democratic institutions. The analytical framework is an integrated one, comprising formal choice theory and normative democratic theory. The first part of the thesis focuses on the possibility of environmentaldemocratic institutions. Chapter 1 introduces the dilemma of green democracy – a conflict between three plausible desiderata for environmental democracy – and suggests several proposals for avoiding the dilemma. It concludes that, as long as the dilemma is resolved, it is logically possible to construct environmental-democratic institutions. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 assess the desirability of the different proposals in terms of procedure and outcome. The general conclusion is that whether these proposals are desirable depends on a number of conditions and/or contextual factors. The second part of the thesis examines the substantive issues in designing environmental-democratic institutions. Chapter 5 discusses how the discursive dilemma in social choice theory and the normative ends of deliberation constrain the inputs of such institutions. Chapter 6 demonstrates how the concept of distributed cognition, drawn from cognitive/computer science, reconciles the tension between technocracy and democracy. Chapter 7 suggests how the theory of cognitive dissonance, drawn from psychology, challenges the epistemic performance of practicable (environmental-) deliberative-democratic institutions. The overall conclusion is two-fold. First, democracy can, at least in principle, secure environmental sustainability, provided that the dilemma of green democracy is resolved. Second, interdisciplinary ideas are useful for designing good democratic institutions for collective environmental decision-making. This conclusion has implications not only for intellectual enquiry, but also for institutional design in practice.

This thesis explores the creation and resolution of environmental conflicts in modern Sweden from a narrative ethics perspective. By problematising the concept of Swedish exceptionalism in environmental questions, it allows for a multi-disciplinary reappraisal of Sweden’s international reputation as a nominally ‘green’ nation. This emphasises the dissonance between perceptions of a self-identifying green nation and idea of a sustainable modern green state which is structured in a sustainable way. In so doing, the thesis asserts the pluralistic approach to the ethics and moral identities of modernity pioneered by the Scottish political and moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre as a means of understanding the diverse and often contradictory nature of Sweden’s environmental performance. The main source material for this investigation is a corpus of circa 1000 texts in four major newspapers, taken from debates surrounding three environmental conflicts between 1970 and 2010. These conflicts are the 1970 campaign to save the Vindel River from development, the 1980 referendum on nuclear energy in Sweden and the role played by the proposed Stockholm Bypass road project in the 2010 municipal and national elections. Chosen to cover variation in location, size and time period, they yield a substantial sample in relation to the discussion and resolution of environmental conflict. These texts are listed in full in Appendix II. Utilising the theory of textual selves presented in the analytical discourse methodology of Norman Fairclough and the reflexive nature of self-identity within modern narrative, these entries are then coded. This coding uses the concept of a textual ethos developed within Fairclough’s Text Oriented Discourse Analysis (TODA) methodology. From this large corpus, thirteen specific examples reflecting these quantitative labels are more closely analysed using TODA. This pays attention to both their composition and to the wider context of the debates from which they are taken. In the detailed analyses that follow, the conflicts and their characteristics are viewed through the concept of modern non-rational doxa. This entails argumentation being based on temporally specific contexts and narratives over epistemologically coherent rationalism. Parallels are drawn between larger societal meta-narratives and values and the argumentation for specific choices about the future made by individual authors, and it is argued that the continued fragmentation of Swedish politics has implications for understanding the concept of norms and the hegemony of ideologies or ethical standpoints. Discussing the impact of such a situation on Sweden’s future development and the potential for export of Swedish environmental practice, this study ultimately posits that any attempt to replicate Swedish environmental practice must come to terms with the narrative context in which action is to take place. Finally, it speculates on the challenges of writing and arguing for truly sustainable eco-modernities.