A Tese trata da ação pública voltada à governança socioambiental da Amazônia na década de 2000. Os objetivos da pesquisa foram registrar o conjunto de ações implementadas e analisar os principais elementos que explicam os resultados do sucesso obtido na inédita redução do desmatamento verificada no período, que se caracterizou pela consistência e constância. A metodologia adotada consistiu na identificação e classificação das iniciativas desenvolvidas nos campos institucional, legal e político pelo Plano de Prevenção e Controle do Desmatamento na Amazônia (PPCDAm); avaliação do esforço governamental empreendido de forma comparativa com as iniciativas da década anterior; suas correlações com as taxas de desmatamento; o grau de impacto nas mídias nacional e regional das medidas implementadas; e a percepção de atores locais sobre os principais fatores que explicam a redução obtida no desmatamento. Para o desenvolvimento da pesquisa foi realizada extensa revisão bibliográfica; analisados dados secundários das principais instituições de pesquisa e de produção de estatísticas socioeconômicas sobre a região; feito levantamento detalhado dos atos legais e infralegais elaborados e das ações implementadas pelo governo federal na região no período de 1990 a 2010; levantamento pormenorizado das matérias sobre desmatamento na Amazônia veiculadas pelos principais veículos de imprensa, em âmbito nacional e regional do período de 1990 a 2010; produção de dados primários, notadamente por meio da utilização de sistema de informação geográfica, que permitem o cruzamento e espacialização de informações secundárias; e realizada pesquisa semiestruturada com atores locais. Os resultados indicam que, associadas ao efeito direto das ações desenvolvidas, muitas das quais tiveram baixa implementação, o volume expressivo de ações de fiscalização e ordenamento territorial, principalmente com a criação de unidades de conservação em terras públicas nas zonas de expansão da fronteira agrícola e no aperfeiçoamento do monitoramento por satélite, somadas à grande repercussão das operações lideradas pela Polícia Federal e a presença do governo federal de forma articulada e constante, estabeleceu na sociedade local uma percepção acentuada de aumento do risco, que induziu a uma mudança de comportamento em relação ao cumprimento da legislação ambiental. A conclusão gera elementos para uma discussão sobre a importância da coerência de posicionamento do Estado e sua clara comunicação à sociedade, constância de atuação e rigor na exigência do cumprimento das normas legais para, juntamente com medidas objetivas de ação pública, na indução da governança socioambiental com efetividade e eficácia. As mudanças no posicionamento do governo federal frente ao tema observadas nos últimos cinco anos e a estabilização da curva descendente da taxa de desmatamento observada a partir de 2012 juntamente com o recente aumento registrado nos anos 2014 e 2015, reforçam os argumentos para a oportunidade dessa discussão. / The thesis deals with public action focused on the socio-environmental governance of the Amazon in the decade of 2000. The goals of the research were to record the set of actions implemented and to analyze the main elements that explain the results of the success obtained in the unprecedented reduction of deforestation in the period, characterized by consistency and constancy. The methodology adopted consisted in identifying and classifying the initiatives developed in the institutional, legal and political fields by the Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon (PPCDAm, in Portuguese acronym); evaluation of the governmental effort undertaken in a comparative manner with the initiatives of the previous decade; their correlations with deforestation rates; the impact of the implemented measures on national and regional media; and perception of local actors about the main factors that explain the achieved reduction in deforestation. For the development of the research, an extensive bibliographic review was carried out; secondary data from the main research institutions and socioeconomic statistics on the region were analyzed; a detailed survey of the legal and regulatory acts and the actions implemented by the federal government in the region in the period from 1990 to 2010 was produced; a detailed survey of the press material about Amazon deforestation carried out by the main media outlets at national and regional levels from 1990 to 2010 was developed; production of primary data, notably through the use of geographic information system, thus allowing secondary information intersection and spatialization; and a semi-structured research with local actors was undertaken. The results indicate that, associated with the direct effect of the developed actions, many of which had low implementation, the expressive number of actions on territorial control and planning, mainly with the creation of conservation units on public lands in the agricultural frontier zones and the improvement of satellite monitoring, along with the great repercussion of operations led by the Federal Police and the presence of the federal government in an articulated and constant manner, established among local society a remarkable perception of risk increase, which induced a change of behavior in relation to their compliance with environmental legislation. The conclusion creates elements for a discussion about the importance of the coherence in the State\'s position and its clear communication to the society, constancy of action and rigor in the requirement of compliance with the legal norms, together with objective measures of public action, in the induction of an effective and efficiency socio-environmental governance. The changes in the federal government\'s position in the last five years and the stabilization of the downward trend in the rate of deforestation observed from 2012, as well as the recent increase in 2014 and 2015, reinforce the arguments for the opportunity of this discussion.

The natural capital approach (NCA) has increasingly become mainstream in environmental governance. This approach involves highlighting the economic value of the natural environment in order to make better informed decisions. Despite its mainstreaming and growing appeal, critical voices endure. These critiques frame natural capital in the context of global neoliberalisation, primarily focusing on its adverse implications for the Global South. By contrast, this thesis examines the role NCA has in a national, developed, Western setting – where the issues created by global power imbalances and neo-colonialism are less pertinent. The UK is at the forefront of NCA, with its 25 Year Environment Plan outlining its ambition to embed the approach into environmental decision-making. This thesis adopts a poststructural approach in order to examine the underlying assumptions, constructions, and moral framework of the UK’s NCA. It constitutes a policy analysis that employs the tools of the ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ approach to three distinct sites of analysis - nature, instrumentation, and justice. Findings point to how NCA rests on a number of contingent assumptions, produces specific problematisations, subjects and objects, and ultimately derives from a presentism ethic.

In this doctorate, I provide a balanced and collaborative approach to knowledge/value change between the contesting worldviews of indigenous knowledge and western science, termed 'synergistic'. My search for synergy is comparative and reconciliatory. This endeavours to overcome the popular pre-occupation with conflict and opposition. Rather, both difference and similarity are recognised. Through the comparison of such synergy, I argue that Māori development requires for its further advancement a focus not only on difference and conflict, but also on affinity and convergence. My primary concern is to establish a better understanding of the synergistic, adaptive strategies or indigenous innovation of Māori kaitiaki, environmental stewards. I investigate conflicting and converging Māori and western scientific conservation and use values in Aotearoa/New Zealand environmental governance and management regimes under the Resource Management Act 1991, with specific regard to indicator development. The balance of values were compared in ecological environmental governance, from five Aotearoa governmental authorities and three Māori river communities, utilising Māori and western social science methods. My focus on indicators pinpoints contesting knowledge/value change between the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge and dominance of western science. This seeks to highlight the potential viability of Māori kaitiakitanga, stewardship in global and national terms of sustainability. However, potential synergy is held back by a prevailing viewpoint of the indigenous worldview as backward, past-oriented and non-synergistic. An oppositional dogma predominates, which is a key problem to overcome. It spans world and national literature, resulting in considerable gaps in knowledge on synergy, conceptually, methodologically, empirically and analytically. This is addressed by an authoritative Māori synergistic standpoint from my own cultural lens and decolonised theorising, termed 'nuanced problem solving'. I articulate both worldviews in knowledge/value change through comparative, evolutionary, multi-dimensional, cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary research on synergy. My nuanced problem solving encapsulates the two main parts of the doctorate, whereby synergy is correlated between theory and social practice. Part one deals with value comparison in theory utilising high abstracted concepts and methods at the global level of environmental governance. Part two deals with value balance in social practice utilising medium abstracted and concrete empirical and analytical research at global, national, regional, district and cross-tribal levels of environmental governance. Potential synergy cross-cuts each part from high abstracted thought down and from the practical flax roots up. I argue that Māori advancement fluctuates between them. Drawing on cultural and theoretical leanings of the Māori synergistic standpoint, both a strong correlation with existing theory and expanded synergistic theorising was found. Due to the expansiveness of the research, these correlated findings only provide an embryonic understanding of potential synergy. A postscript describes my other work on synergy with five external agencies concerning foreshore, lakeside, wastewater, land disposal and carbon marketing kaitiakitanga. I argue that additional research on synergy is needed in order to further advance Māori.

This eassy assesses the recent trend of transnational private governance by analyzing the multiple functions and impacts of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), one of the most representative institutions in global environmental governance. After clarifying the general context of global governance, civil society and the rise of transnational private certifying, this article compares different interactive processes between the FSC and the government. This article concludes different patterns of how the FSC interacts with a country. Moreover, by interviewing the enterprises in Taiwan, this article sums up how the FSC crosses over the nation borders and achieves transnational governance through private certification.

The potential to supplement the potable water supply with highly treated municipal wastewater, or sewage, is of increasing interest to water managers and planners in many parts of the world. Seen as an option of last resort as recently as the late 1990s, today engineers commonly consider potable water reuse projects to be as safe as, if not safer than, conventionally sourced drinking water supplies. Nevertheless, only a few cities across the world intentionally augment drinking water supplies with highly treated wastewater. The objective of my dissertation is to examine the governance of potable recycled water planning to better understand how potable recycling projects emerge as a water management strategy. Political aspects of planned potable reuse are often recognized, and even lamented by water planners and industry experts. However, there is a paucity of research that empirically analyzes the political aspects that influence public decisions on potable water projects. This study asks: how are potable water projects made, shaped, and frustrated? To examine the governance arrangements of this emerging water management strategy this research project considers three critical issues: (1) public values and social pressure, (2) the political, legal, and institutional contexts, and (3) the role of subjectivity in defining facts, themes, and solutions. As part of this study I use Q Methodology to explore shared attitudes regarding the principles that should govern the future of planned potable reuse. The overall analyses support the notion that there is more than one way to understand and approach potable water recycling, and that socially-held viewpoints are informed by social-spatial practices. The results reveal two distinct "common sense" shared ways of thinking that pivot on ideas about the appropriate technology and reflect contested visions of ideal society. My dissertation is the first to apply Q Methodology to water recycling in the United States, and I use it to examine the subjective preferences of people who participate in water recycling operations or planning. Results indicate that there are at least two commonly held viewpoints concerning the future of planned potable water recycling, which I have labeled "neosanitarian" and "ecosanitarian." Drawing upon tenets established in the Progressive Era, neosanitarians strongly believe that potable water recycling is a safe, feasible, and appropriate way to expand urban water supplies. Drawing upon tenets established in ecology, ecosanitarians are not opposed to potable water recycling, however they are also interested in radical alternatives to the sanitary status quo. Both neosanitarians and ecosanitarians want to see a more sustainable approach to water planning, yet they disagree on what a more sustainable approach actually looks like in practice. For example, neosanitarians favor microfiltration and advanced wastewater treatment, while ecosanitarians prefer composting toilets and preventative actions. Both neosanitarians and ecosanitarians accept potable reuse as a workable solution, yet there are deep divisions between the two regarding the appropriate scale of technology, the proper level of public participation, and the root cause of water scarcity. While there is wide-spread agreement on certain ends (e.g., sustainability, potable reuse), there is serious disagreement about the appropriate the means to getting there (e.g., appropriate technology, level of public participation). The results illustrate how different "ways of seeing the world" contribute to the technological choices that define appropriate behavior, which, in turn, produces different kinds of communities and environments, and conditions the range of political possibilities.

Achieving environmental s¬ustainability in human organization is the defining challenge of the modern era. In light of the inability of the existing economic paradigm to provide for sustainability objectives, novel approaches to understanding and managing economic activities are required. Towards this end, the emergent field of ecological economics provides an alternative paradigm that expressly prioritizes the development of the theory and tools necessary to operationalize environmental sustainability in economic activity, which is viewed as prerequisite to sustainability in any other sphere. Here, I advance an internally consistent framework for understanding and implementing the core ecological economic sustainability criteria: appropriate scale relative to biocapacity; distributive justice; and efficient allocation. This framework includes: (1) an ecological communitarian conception of distributive justice which recognizes environmental sustainability as the first principle of distributive justice; (2) the rationale for biophysically-consistent ecological economic modeling of human activities as a basis for environmentally-enlightened policy and management; and (3) an appeal for scale-oriented environmental governance as could potentially be operationalized by a strong, centralized World Environment Organization. I further apply this framework to evaluating the current and future status of livestock production systems at regional and global scales with respect to efficiency considerations as well as their relationships to sustainability boundary conditions for human activities as a whole. It is suggested that the current and projected scale of the livestock sector is fundamentally unsustainable, and that all leverage points must be exploited to rein in this sector in the interest of preventing irreversible ecological change. This must include, but cannot be limited to, strong eco-efficiency measures and changes in production technologies, species substitutions, and consumption patterns and volumes. Outcomes are interpreted in terms of their implications for environmental policy and governance oriented towards the sustainability objective.

By permitting the integration of multiple forms of knowledge through joint fact-finding, it is suggested that collaborative governance approaches can produce more holistic and place-based understandings of environmental problems and help to alleviate conflict among stakeholders over the knowledge that is used to make decisions. Despite the central role of knowledge in collaborative processes, research in the collaborative environmental governance field to-date has provided limited practical insight into what they can and cannot achieve or how processes should be structured and run to produce successful outcomes related to knowledge production and use. This study seeks to address this gap in the literature through three specific research objectives: (1) to develop a theoretical framework for analyzing knowledge production and use in collaborative environmental governance; (2) to use the framework to analyze knowledge production and use in a real-world collaborative environmental governance process; and (3) to offer recommendations for designing or adapting collaborative environmental governance processes to better achieve the goals of collaboration related to knowledge production and use. A multiple case study approach was used to analyze knowledge production and use in a collaborative water allocation planning process in South Australia. The findings affirm that a number of theorized process and outcome criteria associated with successful knowledge production and use are achievable in practice. Despite limited evidence that local actors were involved directly in producing knowledge within the processes that were examined, the findings showed that participants in at least one of the cases were able to achieve a high level of understanding and acceptance of the knowledge used to base policy decisions, as well as to build social capital among scientists and local participants. This paradox draws attention to limits of current theories in the collaborative environmental governance literature for designing and implementing successful collaboration and offers important insights for evaluating collaborative processes. The study also provides a preliminary set of recommendations for structuring and executing collaborative processes to achieve successful outcomes related to knowledge production and use. While the findings of this study relate most directly to the water allocation planning system in South Australia, they are also transferable to other collaborative institutions, particularly those that are nested within a more traditional top-down system of governance.

This dissertation is an attempt to examine how humans in wealthy, post-industrial urban contexts understand sustainability and respond to their concerns given their sphere of influence. I focus specifically on sustainable consumption policy and practice in Sweden, where concerns for sustainability and consumer-based responses are strong. This case raises interesting questions about the relative strength of sustainability movements in different cultural and geo-political contexts as well as the specific factors that have motivated the movement toward sustainable living in Sweden. The data presented here supports the need for multigenic theories of sustainable consumerism. Rather than relying on dominant theories of reflexive modernization, there is a need for locally and historically grounded analyses. The Swedish case illustrates that the relative strength of sustainable living is linked not only to high levels of awareness about social, economic and ecological threats to sustainability, but also to a strong and historically rooted emphasis on equality in Sweden. In this context, sustainable living is often driven by concerns for global equity and justice. The research therefore affirms the findings of those like Hobson (2002) and Berglund and Matti (2005) who argue that concerns for social justice often have more resonance with citizen-consumers - driving more progressive lifestyle changes than personal self-interest. Yet despite the power of moral appeals, this research also suggests that the devolution of responsibility for sustainability - to citizens in their roles as consumers on the free market – has failed to produce significant change. While many attribute this failure to “Gidden’s Paradox” or the assumption that people will not change their lifestyles until they see and feel risks personally, the data presented here illustrates that even those most committed to sustainable living confront structural barriers that they do not have the power to overcome. The paradox is not that people can’t understand or act upon threats to sustainability from afar; but rather that it is extremely difficult to live more sustainably without strong social support, market regulation and political leadership. Sustainability policy must work to confront the illusion of choice by breaking down structural barriers, particularly for people who do not have the luxury of choosing alternatives.

China's quest for sustainable development has given birth to a set of contested ‘ecological construction’ programmes. Focusing on ‘ecological resettlement’, a type of policy measure in a programme for restoring degraded grasslands, this thesis sets out a critical analysis in opposition to the dominant technical and managerial approaches to understanding environmentalisation. The aim is to draw out the politics of the formulation, implementation and effects of ecological resettlement at and across different scales. The study combines fieldwork, interviews, analysis of policy documents, and statistical analysis while theoretically, in addition to political ecology, it incorporates concepts and models from environmental governance, migration, and pastoralism studies. Environmentalisation is examined through three types of analysis: environmentalisation of the state, reshaping of state-society relations, and (re)territorialisation. A central theme is how local processes are linked to national considerations and how the local state acts as an intermediary between the central state and the pastoralists. The analysis exposes the practices that enabled the central state to define the problem of grasslands and devise interventions, illustrating the environmentalisation of the state. However, at the local level, incentives and interests defined by the political structure drove the developmental local state to pursue short-term-effective rather than sustainable practices. On the other hand, while the pastoral households responded to the projects with different strategies, their migration decisions suggested that social, economic and cultural considerations played a more important role than environmental concerns. Moreover, ecological resettlement has led to a significant change of Mongolian pastoralism. Land-tenure-based management further fragmented rangelands while the emergence of new social arrangements enabled migrant households to remain involved with pastoralism.

<p>In an era of 'global' oceans crisis, marine conservationists have issued a resounding call to increase the spatial scale of ocean conservation. This dissertation examines the drivers and implications of recent efforts to scale up ocean conservation in places simultaneously celebrated for their revival of community-based conservation: the Pacific Islands region, the Micronesian sub-region, and the nation of Palau. Toward this end, this research engages and advances critical human geography theory on scalar politics and institutional theory on the governance of common pool resources to address the overarching questions: why and how are state and non-state actors rescaling ocean conservation, and with what social, political, and institutional consequences? These questions are approached empirically through a multi-sited case study that ethnographically tracks institutions, actors, funding, and agendas from the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to five Pacific Island nations and territories, revealing the links among macro and micro level processes in diverse political and geographical spaces. </p><p> This research conceptualizes the rescaling of ocean conservation as an integral component of social struggles for empowerment. Results illustrate how state and non-state actors pursue their contextually specific goals by working together to scale up the objects of ocean conservation. The means through which they achieve rescaling include discursive framings, performative acts, and institutional changes. Most significantly, these `scalar practices' have resulted in empowerment of environmental non-governmental organizations and Pacific Island governments within multi-level conservation governance processes; accumulation of international attention and funding at the regional level in Micronesia; and reduced local autonomy for conservation governance in Palau.</p><p> Overall, this work contributes an empirically grounded, theoretically engaged, and policy-relevant analysis of the scalar politics and institutional dynamics that are reshaping the actors, objectives, and institutions of contemporary ocean conservation across multiple levels of governance. Conclusions advance theory on the scalar dimensions of environmental governance by conceptualizing regions as strategically constructed tools of environmental politics; expanding understanding of the form and function of multi-level regimes for the governance of large common pool resources; and advancing constructive theoretical dialogue between critical human geographers and institutional theorists. This work may also inform policy discussions by illuminating complex tradeoffs that result from scalar rearrangements.</p> / Dissertation