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Environmental conflicts are multi-dimensional. Individual components of environmental and resource-related conflicts are closely interlinked with other structural societal elements, including economic, social, political and cultural developments. Coastal areas are significant for people’s subsistence, as well as industrial development, cultural heritage, and waterways; therefore, they require integrated research approaches and the implementation of comprehensive strategies of resource management, dispute resolution and conflict prevention. This qualitative exploratory study contributes to the development of the field of environmental conflict resolution (ECR) by examining the perceptions and experiences of 52 key stakeholders from the coastal areas of the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States (US) with regards to environmental and resource conflicts and conflict resolution approaches. The study invited coastal stakeholders such as environmental policymakers, researchers, academics, educators and NGO members to share their perceptions, images, experiences and knowledge about environmental and resource conflicts and conflict resolution practices in the coastal areas of the Great Lakes. The framework of this holistic study integrates public policy, alternative dispute resolution, conflict analysis, project evaluation, dialogue and public participation, education and other creative interventions into an inclusive strategy of integrated environmental and resource management of coastal areas. Analysis of the study participants’ responses revealed several key findings. First, the multi-dimensional character of environmental and resource conflicts and the wide range of coastal stakeholders involved necessitate creating spaces for dialogue and communication among coastal stakeholders, which may facilitate relationship building and encourage collaborative problem solving and constructive conflict resolution. Second, establishing links between science and policymaking within environmental and resource management, as well as introducing conflict resolution education for coastal stakeholders, may significantly enhance the capacity of coastal stakeholders in ECR. Third, coastal stakeholders in the Great Lakes have an extensive and wide-ranging existing local knowledge, experience and expertise in resolving environmental and resource conflicts. Fourth, a conflict resolution system’s design developed in this study may serve as an integrated framework for the analysis and resolution of environmental and resource conflicts. This ECR system design involves such important components as conducting conflict and stakeholder analysis; identifying the root causes of conflict; bringing conflict participants together to discuss resolution options; and building in continuous evaluation of environmental conflict resolution processes.

Environmental conflicts are multi-dimensional. Individual components of environmental and resource-related conflicts are closely interlinked with other structural societal elements, including economic, social, political and cultural developments. Coastal areas are significant for people’s subsistence, as well as industrial development, cultural heritage, and waterways; therefore, they require integrated research approaches and the implementation of comprehensive strategies of resource management, dispute resolution and conflict prevention. This qualitative exploratory study contributes to the development of the field of environmental conflict resolution (ECR) by examining the perceptions and experiences of 52 key stakeholders from the coastal areas of the Great Lakes region of Canada and the United States (US) with regards to environmental and resource conflicts and conflict resolution approaches. The study invited coastal stakeholders such as environmental policymakers, researchers, academics, educators and NGO members to share their perceptions, images, experiences and knowledge about environmental and resource conflicts and conflict resolution practices in the coastal areas of the Great Lakes. The framework of this holistic study integrates public policy, alternative dispute resolution, conflict analysis, project evaluation, dialogue and public participation, education and other creative interventions into an inclusive strategy of integrated environmental and resource management of coastal areas. Analysis of the study participants’ responses revealed several key findings. First, the multi-dimensional character of environmental and resource conflicts and the wide range of coastal stakeholders involved necessitate creating spaces for dialogue and communication among coastal stakeholders, which may facilitate relationship building and encourage collaborative problem solving and constructive conflict resolution. Second, establishing links between science and policymaking within environmental and resource management, as well as introducing conflict resolution education for coastal stakeholders, may significantly enhance the capacity of coastal stakeholders in ECR. Third, coastal stakeholders in the Great Lakes have an extensive and wide-ranging existing local knowledge, experience and expertise in resolving environmental and resource conflicts. Fourth, a conflict resolution system’s design developed in this study may serve as an integrated framework for the analysis and resolution of environmental and resource conflicts. This ECR system design involves such important components as conducting conflict and stakeholder analysis; identifying the root causes of conflict; bringing conflict participants together to discuss resolution options; and building in continuous evaluation of environmental conflict resolution processes.

At the heart of liberal political theory is a formula for enabling diverse groups to coexist peacefully in spite of their differences. This formula involves seeking broad consensus on certain key political institutions as well as on moral norms against imposing views on others. In recent centuries, this formula has been highly successful. However, it is now under attack from green theorists who claim liberal societies will systematically fail to protect the environment, precipitating a global ecological crisis. The radical societal transformations advocated by these greens diverge from traditional liberal arrangements and seek to entrench green ideas in the foundations of the political order. In this dissertation, I examine how liberals can rebut such proposals without simply dismissing greens and their beliefs. I argue that the most promising route to a satisfactory liberal response is pragmatic in nature, showing that greens have little to gain from radicalism and more to gain from a continued commitment to liberalism. I develop this argument in two complementary ways, demonstrating first that greens have overestimated the likely benefits of their transformational proposals and second that a conciliatory approach in the spirit of liberalism offers great promise for achieving green goals. Ultimately, I contend that even for those who see a crisis on the horizon and worry that liberal societies will not respond appropriately, liberalism remains the best available approach to political life.

The interest in further expansion of wind power has increased significantly during the last decades, as it is an environmentally and financially competitive energy source. Wind power is an important part of achieving energy goals and climate commitments in several countries, not least in Sweden. The localisation of the wind turbines has, however, appeared to be controversial and local resistance occurs more frequently as the energy source expands. This creates a complex environmental conflict where various actors struggle to obtain differing goal settings. Such a situation occurred in Ödeshög municipality, when wind power entrepreneurs expressed their interests in establish wind turbines in forest and transition areas of the municipality. This thesis aims to emphasise how wind power expansion became such a controversial environmental conflict in Ödeshög. To be able to do this, the conflict is analysed from an Actor-Network Theory perspective. This theoretical framework has been used with the ambition to describe how the involved actors strategically have acted to possibly influence the outcome of the conflict. The situation in Ödeshög have much to say about how these conflicts occur and by learning from this situation several similar conflicts may be avoided.

This research aims to understand environmental conflicts generated by large investment projects. Theoretically, this research locates itself within the historical political ecology perspective. It seeks to understand environmental conflicts as a clash of historical representations over the environment that can be traced from the process of dispossession by colonialism and the consolidation of the national state. It is argued that certain places have been constructed as specific socio-natural entities for the reproduction of power relations over nature and people through environmental transformations by discourses and frameworks about environment and society, the establishment of material practices, and the collapsing of biophysical features within political-economy. The case under analysis is the construction of dams in Chilean Patagonia through the HidroAysén project. This project belongs to the transnational company ENDESA and the Chilean private company Colbún. HidroAysén aims to build five dams across two rivers located in the Aysén region in Western Patagonia, a region that has been a scene for the territorialisation of the colonial and postcolonial state over the last four hundred years. The research questions to understand this environmental conflict are: How has Chilean Patagonia been socially constructed in the past? What political economic conditions and discourses enable dams to be built in Chilean Patagonia? Which discourses are in conflict regarding the HidroAysén Project? This research follows a qualitative approach focused on Foucauldian genealogy to understand discourses and representations about the environment. Data have been collected through secondary sources about the history of Patagonia, including accounts from explorations, government reports, scholarly articles, information from the HidroAysén company, and information from the anti-dam campaign Patagonia without Dams. I have also used fifty interviews conducted in Patagonia with people who live in the places that could be affected by the construction of dams. Data have been analysed through the constructionist approach of grounded theory and critical discourse analysis. The main findings are that environmental conflicts have historical and cultural content. Patagonia is a cultural landscape created through the territorialisation of the colonial and postcolonial state, and at the same time, through a process of counter-territorialisation spontaneously performed by settlers. Elites have used Patagonia to increase their power in a material and symbolic way through the mobilization of pre-existing discourses. Therefore, Patagonia does not pre-exist its construction: there is nothing natural about Patagonia but a revisited history of otherness and dispossession. Consequently, environmental conflict over HidroAysén is not only about the hydroelectricity project, but about how territories are constructed and socially and environmentally transformed through the mobilization of representations. The conclusion is that the environmental transformations are one of the most severe forms of inequality.

This study examines the relationship between ecological sustainability and violent conflict at both the interstate and intrastate level. In particular, this study explores the effect of ecological sustainability of a society on the initiation and the occurrence of violent conflict. By developing a theory, which is named "Eco-peace," this study hypothesizes that the more ecologically sustainable the socioeconomic system of societies, the less likely the society is to initiate interstate conflict. Regarding intrastate conflict, it is hypothesized that the more ecologically sustainable the mode of development pursued by the Third World society is, the more likely that society is to experience intrastate conflicts. To test the hypotheses, this study conducts cross-national time-series analyses for 97-127 countries. Negative binomial and Poisson models are used for interstate conflict during 1960-2001, and logit and rare event logit models are used for intrastate conflict during 1960-1999. Militarized interstate dispute dataset and Uppsala Armed Conflict Program dataset are employed for interstate and intrastate conflict. For ecological sustainability, Ecological sustainability factor index and Environmental sustainability index are used. Through the analyses, this study found the supports for the theoretical argument that the ecologically unsustainable modes of development cause the initiation of interstate conflict and the incidence of intra-state conflict in the Third World.

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In water governance, where problems are controversial and value laden, different forms of stakeholder involvement have become common and are frequently required. Stakeholder participation is often recognized as fundamental to the legitimacy and success of negotiated environmental decisions, but the intricacies of why stakeholders participate has received less attention. We examine factors that influenced stakeholder participation in the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement and Klamath Hydroelectric Settlement Agreement of 2010. The research draws on in-depth, semistructured interviews of a sample recruited from stakeholder organizations in the Klamath River Basin. Results indicate that previous negative experiences did not translate into nonparticipation; divisions within seemingly aligned stakeholder organizations encouraged some stakeholders to participate and others to actively oppose negotiations; stakeholders' perceptions of power differentials encouraged both stakeholder participation and exclusion in negotiations; and concerns about relationship development during negotiations suggest that relationship building may be viewed as part of the negotiation process.

A perennial challenge in efforts to deal with environmental issues is the question of how to simplify. As such, where and when one simplifies is often a source of conflict, but perversely also paramount to finding a solution. This thesis focuses on one long-standing environmental issue, the whaling debate. Specifically, it performs a strategically sited microethnography of Faroese whaling, grindadráp, exploring linkages between actions on local and international scales. This thesis aims to contribute to environmental sociological efforts to analyse and resolve complex socio-environmental problems. The five papers that together constitute this thesis collectively provide a description of grindadráp from the local scale of the bays where pilot whales are killed to the international forums where whaling as a whole remains an issue at the heart of an on-going, deadlocked conflict. Primarily based on three months’ fieldwork in the Faroe Islands, this thesis combines observation, interviews, media and other literature. The theoretical lenses employed are that of the ‘ontological turn’ and the ‘theory of sociocultural viability’ (cultural theory). The former utilised as a tool for ethnographic practice with the latter used to analyse how different perspectives on reality manifest throughout the whaling conflict. This thesis demonstrates that grindadráp has changed through time as a result of the interactions between actors with different views on the matter at hand. However, in contrast to the global whaling debate, this interaction has been mostly constructive, with appropriate changes in practice ensuring grindadráp’s continued popularity within the Faroe Islands. Furthermore, its continuation will likely depend on grindadráp’s continued ability to balance different perspectives. This thesis thus echoes environmental sociological calls for improved dialogue in the framing and resolution of environmental disputes, suggesting that cultural theory provides a tool that balances relativism and pragmatism in dealing with complex environmental problems.