This thesis will address the impact of political and economic forces on the equitable access to fresh water in Ecuador. Demographic factors such as the rural-to-urban migration and the political and economic forces have strongly influenced the debate over the privatization of the provision of potable water and sanitation services. Within the context of Ecuador, two different approaches by the largest cities, Quito and Guayaquil, are analyzed; in Guayaquil, the services were privatized, while in Quito, the public utility was corporatized, remaining under public control. It concludes arguing that in the face of political instability and a lack of regulatory enforcement, neither public nor private provision adequately supplies marginalized communities with water and sanitation services. Watershed management is therefore crucial to maintaining a sound city water-management plan. Its flexibility and openness to innovative alliances between various stakeholders creates great potential for this approach.

In the face of dire threats posed by anthropogenic climate change, a growing international Movement for Fossil Fuel Divestment has emerged to challenge the political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry. Building off a history of college and university divestment campaigns, students are spearheading the movement to rid their institutions’ endowments of investments in the top 200 companies with the largest reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. Highlighting perspectives from within the movement and drawing from literature in social movement theory and Climate Justice, I explore three crucial components of the student Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement: Climate Justice, perceptions of risk, and potential political impacts. I argue that Fossil Fuel Divestment is a powerful component of the broader Climate Movement because it is mobilizing and radicalizing a new generation of activists to fight the climate crisis, challenging the dominant paradigm of individualized climate action, and is significantly influencing the public discourse on climate change. In seeking to further illuminate the power of this movement, I explore the possibilities and limitations of divestment as a tactic for Climate Justice and offer recommendations for moving forward.

This thesis takes an unconventional approach to environmental racism. Through the lens of white privilege and racial capitalism, I analyze hazardous waste procedures, work site dynamics, and governmental enforcement. Southeast Los Angeles encompasses 26 neighborhoods and the communities racial demographic is 85.8% people of color. The region is home to an abundance of hazardous waste generators, and the area is disproportionately burdened by pollution compared to the rest of LA County. I chose white privilege as a framework because more often than not, discrimination in the workplace is unintentional and covert. White privilege manifests through hazardous waste management in four forms: devaluation of worker training, lack of language accommodations, disenfranchisement of employees of color, and enforcement-heavy regulation. The four factors listed impact facility operations and risk health and safety of personnel, especially employees of color working in closest proximity to toxic chemicals. To prioritize the needs of workers of color, I recommend creating a free hazardous waste consultation service modeled after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s service. Ineffective online instruction must be eliminated and replaced with learner-centered empowerment training. Finally, generator management must facilitate a more supportive culture that empowers employees of color as agents of change in the workplace.

I explore the environmental and economic value to be gained by using a greater proportion of renewable distributed generation, mainly solar, relative to centralized generation in the United States in this thesis. I explain the benefits of distributed solar, namely the reductions in environmental damage and the economic benefits for system owners. These benefits will are compared to the obstacles to renewable distributed generation adoption: the costs associated with installation, the political resistance from utilities and power producers, and the aspects of current energy infrastructure that limit wider adoption of distributed solar. I make recommendations for changes to utility strategy, as well as provide policy prescriptions at the local, state, and national level to incentivize distributed solar. These findings and suggested actions can help inform policymakers and utilities as they shape future U.S. energy infrastructure.

"The Texas Failure sets forth the thesis that environmental problems are essentially a product of political decisions and that in Texas the political system has failed to respond to environmental problems because it is dominated by polluter-oriented special interests. The argument advanced is that polluter-oriented interests are well protected by state politicians in both the legislature and regulatory agencies of state government. The thesis is organized around an analysis of such political factors as ideology, leadership, decision making and law as they relate to a political consideration of Texas environmental conditions."-- leaf 1.

The need to protect diverse biological resources from ongoing development pressures is one of today's most pressing environmental challenges. In response, "ecosystem services" has emerged as a conservation framework that links human economies and natural systems through the benefits that people receive from nature. In this dissertation, I investigate the science-policy interface of ecosystem services in order to understand the use of ecosystem service decision support tools and evaluate the pathways through which ecosystem services knowledge impacts decisions. In the first paper, I track an ecosystem service valuation project in California to evaluate how the project changes the social capacity to make conservation-oriented decisions and how decision-makers intend to use ecosystem services knowledge. In a second project, I analyze a global sample of cases and identify factors that can explain the impact of ecosystem services knowledge on decisions. I find that the perceived legitimacy of knowledge (whether it is unbiased and representative of many diverse viewpoints) is an important determinant of whether the knowledge impacts policy processes and decisions. For the third project, I focus on the global use of spatial ecosystem service models. I analyze country-level factors that are associated with use and the effect of practitioner trainings on the uptake of these decision support tools. Taken together, this research critically evaluates how ecosystem service interventions perform. The results can inform the design of boundary organizations that effectively link conservation science with policy action, and guide strategic efforts to protect, restore, and enhance ecosystem services.

1 Taxes, charges and other similar instruments for the environmental protection The reason why I chose this theme is that the environmental protection from the perspective of financial law is a very topical issue in all EU countries, including the Czech Republic. The purpose of my thesis is to analyse instruments that are utilized for environmental protection. The thesis deals with direct and indirect regulatory instruments and the increased attention is paid to the energy taxes. The thesis is composed of five basic chapters, each of them dealing with different aspects of the environmental protection from the perspective of financial law. Chapter One and Two is introductory and defines basic terminology used in the thesis such as the environment and environmental protection or environmental policy. Chapter Three deals with the basic structure of instruments for environmental protection, which are instruments of direct regulation (normative) and indirect regulatory instruments (economic). This chapter also describes the characteristics of these instruments and their advantages and disadvantages. Chapter Four concentrates on economic instruments - environmentally related charges and especially environmentally related taxes. This chapter deals with the term of environmental taxes, their characteristics and...

Payments for ecosystem services (PES), or conservation incentives, are an increasingly popular approach to encouraging natural resources conservation on private lands. The goal of PES approaches is to motivate conservation by private landowners that would not otherwise take place by providing an economic incentive. To achieve this goal, incentive programs must be available to landowners who can provide the desired services; supportive policy structures must be in place; landowners must be willing to participate as sellers of ecosystem services; and the program itself must have an institutional structure that effectively regulates the production, sale, and maintenance of targeted ecosystem services. This dissertation uses a combination of case study and comparative research methods to develop new knowledge and tools for assessing each of these necessary conditions for success. The potential development of an incentive program to conserve habitat for endangered jaguars in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico is used as a case study to understand the attitudes of ranchers toward participation in PES programs and related policies and regulations. Results show that ranchers have strong intrinsic conservation motivations unrelated to economic incentives, coupled with significant concerns about the impacts of government regulations that could accompany participation in a PES program. Comparative research of the institutional structures of existing PES programs is carried out using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. Focusing on water quality trading, one of the most common types of PES program, a classification system for PES program institutional arrangements is developed and the utility of the classification system for analyzing institutional diversity is demonstrated. Together, the case study and comparative research provide a means of linking empirical assessment of PES governance models with the preferences of targeted participants, increasing the likelihood of successful conservation outcomes.

A fundamental purpose of state-mandated growth management has been to infuse regional environmental concerns into local land use planning. Similarly, collaborative ecosystem planning efforts have attempted to encourage local communities to participate in regional planning efforts, and to adopt regional environmental goals and objectives into local land use plans. This paper presents results from a study of state-mandated local planning and collaborative regional planning, addressing in particular local ability to adopt and implement ecosystem planning initiatives for development management. I found that a state mandate not only achieves plans from communities that would not otherwise plan, but also the plans produced are of higher quality than plans made voluntarily without a mandate. However, while these plans generally acknowledge the need for regional resource protection, local plans are rarely go beyond stating support for State minimum resource protection rules. Conversely, I found that participation in a regional ecosystem planning effort had little effect on local land use policy. Within this context, key factors yielding more environmentally focused planning and implementation included local commitment to ecosystem planning, development pressure, and recent natural hazard impacts. Key factors steering communities away from ecosystem management included poor economic conditions, a desire to maintain local autonomy, and consultant-driven planning processes. Challenges for all communities include the ability to adopt policies that address biodiversity and regionally significant landscapes.

This dissertation explores the role of the private and public sectors in hazard mitigation, an important part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA’s) performance requirements from the Stafford Act. Hazard mitigation is the effort to reduce societal impacts from natural disasters by reducing their risk to people, property and infrastructure; before hazards occur. The goal of the work is to contribute to the literature examining the national trend towards privatization and reliance on the free market economy for the provision of government social services, through such public management movements as the “New Public Management” (NPM) of the 1980s and the general efficiency movement that encompasses a greater market orientation in public government and an increase in the use of private sector contractors as an alternative to public provision (Boston 1996). The primary question which this dissertation seeks to answer is: How has the provision of hazard mitigation services by the private sector come to be the norm and what have been the consequences. Due to the broad nature of the question and the lack of previous research, this dissertation will utilize a mixed methods approach with the goal of gaining a broad understanding of the privatization of the hazard mitigation sector in its various manifestations. The approach consists of one case study, broken down into two time periods: hazard mitigation prior to the passage of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, and hazard mitigation following the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. The case study is based primarily upon a series of interviews and includes several imbedded cases. They will be contextualized within an overall description of hazard mitigation focusing on the history and the context of the relevant federal legislation.