Sustainable development duties: New roles for UK economic regulators

When the utility regulators were established in the UK their primary duties and roles were focused on economic regulation – setting price controls for monopolies and promoting competition where possible. The increasing emphasis in government policy on sustainable development has led to pressures on the regulators to pay greater attention to social and environmental concerns alongside economic ones. Ofwat and Ofgem now have duties to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development. Why and how did this change come about, what impact will it have on how the regulators deal with sustainable development and on the nature of regulation?     

‘Eco-civic’ optimisation: A nested framework for planning and managing landscapes

An important institution for regional resource governance is civic engagement in local affairs, including resource use issues. Local civic engagement has traditionally been structured around local government and, more recently, to catchment-based decision-making bodies. If citizens are to participate in regional resource management in ways that are meaningful to them, it is important that both the landscape units being discussed and the jurisdictional boundaries are meaningful. We have been examining how boundaries for resource management regions might be identified. Three considerations are believed to be important if regional resource management is to be meaningful to the citizens involved. Firstly, that the regional boundaries maximise the areal proportion of the region that residents consider to be part of their ‘community’, which should lead to greater commitment to civic engagement in resource management. Secondly, that the character of the landscape units within the region possess a high degree of homogeneity, reflecting greater coincidence of interest among the inhabitants of the region. The third consideration is a hierarchical multi-scaling capacity to deal with externalities of resource use. The approach was tested through identification of a series of nested ‘eco-civic’ resource management regions for north-eastern New South Wales in Australia. The results delineate resource governance regions that nest at local to regional scales for integrated natural resource management. Such ‘eco-civic’ regions demonstrate a better spatial representation of social and ecological characteristics than existing regional frameworks.     

Greenways and the making of urban form

One aspect of greenways which is exciting popular interest in the US is the durability of nineteenth-century parkways and park systems to stitch together fragmenting cities and urbanizing areas. What the Olmsteds, Cleveland, Eliot and Kessler achieved in their regional open-space plans can be the model for a new version of Howard's ‘town/country’ in which greenways/ greenbelts/greenspaces together make a comprehensive ‘green’ infrastructure.Some of the literature and the highlights of historic greenway planning and design in the US are reviewed. Their adaptation to current projects is illustrated through a series of case studies of gradually increasing scale—villages, towns, cities and regions. Such common strategies as ‘green’ streets, parks and playgrounds structuring walkable neighborhoods, intra-neighborhood parkways connecting town/city districts, and regional park systems protecting natural areas for recreation/conservation still confer similar social, economic and environmental benefits. Whether Pedestrian Pockets or Co-housing, expanding historic settlements or preserving the countryside, planning new ‘urban villages’ or neo-traditional towns, greenways can be powerful makers and shapers of urban form at both macro- and micro-scales.     

Economic regulators — are we an endangered species?

This is a revised version of a lecture given on 15 February 1996, hosted by Cranfield School of Management. It looks at the principal criticisms levelled at the economic regulators in the UK, and offers some thoughts about the strengths and weaknesses of the existing system. The system has not generally been too soft on shareholders and managers, and ‘RPI-X’ has usually worked in the customers' interests, but some right of appeal for the consumer would provide a useful safeguard. There is a case for concentrating regulation in fewer bodies, preferably corporate rather than individual. The regulators are certainly not too independent.     

Swedish experiences of incentives for the protection of nature

In Sweden, the maintenance of biological diversity is considered a key element in the development towards a sustainable society. However, the link between sustainable development and biodiversity is far from clear to everybody. It is an important task to explain this link. A cornerstone of Swedish biodiversity policy is that each sector in society has a sectoral responsibility to ensure that its own activities do not cause any long-term loss of biodiversity (but instead help to maintain it). The concept of sectoral responsibility is an important feature of environmental policy in the context of developing new incentives. Besides ‘traditional’ nature conservation tools — such as the protection of sites, purchasing land and general environmental legislation — new, more market-oriented incentives have emerged during the last few years, e.g. certifications schemes in forestry and eco-labelling in agriculture. These new incentives have developed alongside political processes (parliament, government, agencies etc.) and have been formulated and negotiated by ‘market players’. Environmental NGOs, such as WWF Sweden and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, have often taken the lead role in this process. Another feature of these incentives is that they not only apply to products but also to production; an example of this is in forestry where not just the wood but also forest management are in focus. The national agri-environmental programmes, within the context of the European Union's subsidy programme for environmental measures in agriculture, provide a powerful tool for conserving and enhancing biodiversity. In Sweden at least, there is nowadays complete acceptance for the basic view that it is both desirable and necessary to pay the farmers for their ‘production’ of common benefits such as biodiversity in well-managed pastures and meadows. Market-oriented incentives, such as eco-labelling and certification schemes, have an important role to play and should complement other, more traditional tools such as general environmental legislation and protection of sites.     

Pushing the envelope: market mechanisms for sustainable community development

This paper introduces market mechanisms for sustainable community development, an interdependent planning and implementation framework encompassing strategic directions, strategies, actors and instruments for municipal policy making. It examines how the economy influences the unsustainable development of local jurisdictions and how a coherent typology of strategies, actors and policy levers can move communities toward complementary environmental, social and economic outcomes. The paper illustrates a dichotomy between municipal decision making and embraces economic, social and environmental criteria for development of the built environment. It defines sustainable community development and analyzes research findings from senior decision makers in government, academic institutions, industry and non-profits. After critiquing ‘the market mechanism’ and identifying preferred approaches, the authors propose a typology that systematically aligns market signals with implementing sustainable community development policies.     

Natursyns model: A conceptual framework and method for analysing and comparing views of nature

This article presents a conceptual framework and methodology by which stakeholders’ views of nature can be investigated, explained, compared and ‘ideal types’ distilled based on qualitative interviews and, plans, laws and other texts analysed. The aim of such studies is to increase the knowledge about personal, social and cultural aspects of landscape and their relations in general to improve the basis of countryside planning and management in particular. Within the Natursyns model (the Danish word ‘natur’ corresponding to “nature” in English and “syn” implying perceived, imagined, cognized and culturally agreed interpretations) landscape is understood simultaneously as: ‘habitat’, unrealised sense impressions; ‘area’, all the ways in which nature is cognised; and as ‘symbol’, all types of representations of nature and its parts. The use of the model is illustrated; its epistemological foundation, the semiotics and phaneroscopy (phenomenology) of the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce, is described; the content of its fields explained; and benefits and shortcomings discussed.     

Maximising the natural capital benefits of habitat creation: Spatially targeting native woodland using GIS

The establishment of the Common Agricultural Policy has dramatically transformed the relationship between the natural environment and agriculture in the UK. Accordingly, the Government now acknowledges that our stock of ‘natural capital’ is being managed unsustainably and is undertaking Common Agricultural Policy reforms to provide a more sustainable form of agriculture. Such reforms will be based on the economic rationale of payment in return for the provision of natural capital benefits such as biodiversity, carbon sequestration, landscape and recreation. A basic lower tier payment is proposed for general environmental practices, with higher tiers of payments being available for ‘benefit generating’ habitat maintenance and creation.In order to maximise the benefits of such habitat creation, some form of spatial targeting is required. Using geographical information systems (GIS), a suite of spatially explicit criteria are adopted to measure how the potential benefits of native woodland creation vary across the agricultural landscape of the Chilterns natural area. Rather than regarding habitat conservation solely in terms of biodiversity benefits, a more holistic natural capital benefit approach is thus adopted. Public preference on the provision of each benefit is integrated into the GIS-based suitability analysis through multicriteria evaluation. We demonstrate how such a targeted approach leads to large improvements in the delivery of natural capital benefits, with the attainment of biodiversity, landscape and recreation benefits being particularly complementary. As such, the targeted pursuit of natural capital benefits does not compromise the attainment of biodiversity goals, but actually aids in their achievement. However, due to limitations in data availability and accuracy, GIS should be regarded as a decision support tool, with validation of targeted sites being undertaken through a farm audit system.     

Sustainable urban growth in peripheral areas

The monograph addresses the factors affecting the degree of sustainability exhibited by population growth in peripheral urban settlements. Development differentials between core and peripheral regions in countries of different size and various level of economic development are discussed and specifically, the following issues are considered: 1, core versus periphery: inequalities and development needs; 2, development peculiarities of peripheral urban settlements; 3, criteria for sustainable urban growth; 4, factors influencing urban growth in peripheral areas; and 5, planning strategies for regional development. Two major theoretical considerations are posited for discussion. First, that ‘sustainable population growth' of an urban settlement is defined according to the settlement's ability to attract newcomers and retain current residents (migration attractiveness). Second, that the preconditions which are essential for sustainable population growth in peripheral areas are not identical to those in the core. A set of analytical models designed to explain development peculiarities of peripheral settlements are suggested and several planning strategies are also proposed, aimed at enhancing the socio-economic sustainability of existing settlements in peripheral areas. These include: 1, the formation of compact development clusters; 2, the concentration of state and local financial resources on selected development settlements; 3, the adoption of a system of progressive economic incentives to promote private investment in peripheral areas; and 4, stricter regulation of land use in core regions.     

Israel: metropolitan integration or ‘fractured regions’? An alternative perspective

This paper proposes an alternative account of the high degree of power centrality in Israel, by arguing that the territorial ‘fracturing’ of Israel's main social and ethnic groups has prevented the emergence of effective pressure for regional devolution. Israel's character as a settler and settling state, and its central project of Judaising contested territories, enabled the Israeli ‘ethnocracy’ and its (mainly Ashkenazi) elites to create a political geography of ‘fractured ethnic and social regions’. This was achieved by dispersing minorities and legitimising segregation and inequality, all in the name of the ‘national interest’.The Israeli political landscape is therefore organised as ‘fractured regions’, each representing a distinct and interconnected, yet geographically dispersed, set of localities. The logic of dispersal and segregation, in turn, has also influenced patterns of development and residential separation within Israel's main urban areas. Thus ethnic and social fragmentation and conflict, and not a putative process of national or metropolitan integration, can explain much of Israel's highly centralised power structure.     

Managing project sustainability in the extractive industries: Towards a reciprocity framework for community engagement

Merely a peripheral discussion in project management up until recent years, sustainability has become a central issue in both academia and practice. Despite growing interest and research on sustainable project management, we still know little about how projects in the extractive industries, known for their significant local impact, can be used to foster inclusive sustainable development for local communities. Arguing that extractive industries have inadequately addressed the increasing demands of stakeholders for contributing to sustainable development, we build on the philosophical theory of capabilities and the principle of reciprocity to propose a new framework for community engagement and sustainable project management. The reciprocity framework for community engagement is based on the premise that a sustainable extractive project requires its promoter to nurture constructive and mutually beneficial relationships with local communities. By integrating moral considerations into our framework, we contribute to the paradigm shift required to embed projects in sustainable development by better balancing stakeholders' needs at the economic, environmental, and social levels.     

Wild times and domesticated times: the temporalities of environmental lifestyles and politics

In this paper, I explore how environmental movements and lifestyles, like all forms of human action, produce their own characteristic kinds of time. During this exploration, I introduce a number of concepts which I suggest are useful in understanding these temporalities—chronological and kairological time; linear and cyclic time; segmentation and plot; orientation and synchronisation. Whereas the environment as described by the natural sciences is one dominated by chronological, linear time, human time is also kairological, suffused with meaning and intention. The varieties of human action also produce their own distinctive temporalities—some linear, some cyclic, some oriented to external goals, some self-sufficient. The logic of kairological time also requires that we understand individual events and actions as ‘figures’ against a temporal ‘ground’—one that is characteristically organised into an overarching narrative, or broken up into distinctive time segments. Furthermore, human experience is not just situated in time, but orients itself within time—it faces ‘backwards’ into the past, ‘forwards’ into the future, or commits itself to the present. Finally, lived time is also sometimes synchronised with other times—with that of proximate or distant others, or with historical narratives of progress or decline.     

“Rio+10”, sustainability science and Landscape Ecology

The ‘sustainability debate’ has had a profound influence on contemporary Landscape Ecology. This paper explores the implications of the second global summit for the research agendas that developed after the Rio Summit (1992), and argues that although the Declaration from Johannesburg 2002 restates the earlier summit concerns, the messages it sends to the research community are subtly different to those a decade earlier. The growing body of literature, which identifies the need for a new kind of sustainability science, is reviewed, and its relevance to Landscape Ecology is discussed. Although recent commentators have argued for a more transdisciplinary approach to Landscape Ecology that appears to meet the requirements of this new science we still lack ways of taking this forward. The paper concludes by proposing a new paradigm for Landscape Ecology based on the concept of ecosystem goods and services, or natural capital. It is argued that in the decade since the Rio Summit, a key focus of the future research agenda for the discipline should be an exploration of the ‘sustainability choice space’ defined by the interaction of biophysical limits and social and economic values at the landscape-scale. The paper provides a conceptual model (the tongue model) that describes how biophysical and socio-economic constraints can be combined in sustainability planning.     

Deconstructing disaster: Psycho-social impact of building deconstruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans

This phenomenological study inquired into the psycho-social impact of building deconstruction in disaster response. Nine building owners participating in a Mercy Corps’ sponsored building deconstruction program in Post-Katrina New Orleans (2005–2008), engaged in extensive interviews about their experience. The core phenomenon they shared was empowerment arising from a synthesis of positive social interaction and material discovery. Dedicated, local, Mercy Corps trained contractors brought immediate relief to these distressed participants by facilitating “a dignified end” to their buildings and by proxy to the lives they held before the catastrophe. Deconstruction allowed participants to reclaim wealth that would have been scrapped for landfill waste by federal mandate. Participants reported a sudden psychological shift from despair to enthusiasm as they regained control of their property and then discovered value out of the ruined buildings. Data indicated that merely possessing reclaimed material did not explain the psychological transformation. Four of nine informants (including impoverished individuals) experienced psychological transformation by giving all of their reclaimed material away. The sharing of material was described as akin to “donating organs” giving life to their critically injured community. Data indicated the program also promoted more environmentally sustainable behavior. Previously, deconstruction has only been addressed in terms of technical, mechanical, economic, or environmental outcomes. This study adds a new component by seeing the human side of that technical process. This report is a companion study to another; Deconstructing Disaster; Economic and Environmental Impacts of Deconstruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans, which provides a quantitative analysis of material salvage from the Mercy Corps program.     

Sustainable energy policy,socio-economic development,and ecological footprint: The economic significance of natural resources,population growth,and industrial development

The principles of sustainable development consist of economic, societal, and environmental considerations. Economic systems and social structures shape social impacts on health, which are embedded in the broader environment and affect the distribution of energy resources worldwide. Under the consideration of natural resources, population growth, and industrial development, this paper explores the impact of sustainable energy policy and socio-economic development on the ecological footprint in China from 1990 to 2019. Results explain that natural net financial accounts, natural resources, and economic growth are positively associated with the ecological footprint. Environmental sustainability is a long-term result of socio-economic development.     

Enhancing R&D in science-based industry: An optimal stopping model for drug discovery

Drug discovery is a process of science work full of exploration and complexity. Drug researchers face the dilemma of either working ‘forever’ to create a perfect drug or delivering a workable drug within an acceptable deadline to both save lives and make a profit. Specifically, in the compound screening and optimization stage, drug researchers must decide whether or not to stop the research and deliver the result for clinical testing. This paper proposes a model of optimal stopping time to help drug researchers make such decisions. It examines the decision strategies drug researchers should take through maximizing their objective function. The numerical examples given here show that this model is widely applicable. The model offers potential merits in terms of its ability to clarify drug researchers’ decision-making practices and helping managers maneuver through the jungle of science work.     

Ecology on the edge:: Landscape and ecology between town and country

The trends are world wide: people and goods are increasingly mobile, compact cities develop into urban networks, industrialising agriculture is becoming footloose, rural life becomes urban life in a green setting. Social segregation, traffic nuisance, urban sprawl and other unwanted impacts of these trends challenge urban and regional planners. The search for planning answers to these issues is further complicated by the need for sustainable development at a global scale. What is the role of ecology in the context of the discussions on the future of town and country? The traditional, and still dominant, approach is based on the polarity of urban and rural worlds. In this perspective, ecology focuses on the ‘nature’ of protected areas and biodiversity. The papers in this special issue explore the prospects of a wider perspective in which natural processes are seen as basic to both, rural and urban development. This article is digging up the fundamental ‘discourses’ underlying the two approaches to ecology and nature. Firstly, the ‘object-oriented’ and ‘process-oriented’ discourses are analysed. Secondly, the prospects of a process-oriented discourse are illustrated with plans for the Dutch Randstad and the German Ruhr area. Then, some new concepts are introduced that may strengthen the institutional conditions for the process-oriented approach. Discourses, concepts, plans and projects all circle around the central question in this article about the role of ecology in planning the edge of the city.     

New ‘rural lifestyle estates’ in The Netherlands

Recent studies tend to indicate that no longer all presently agricultural land in The Netherlands is required for sustainable agricultural production. Apart from various urban uses and some projects turning agricultural land into nature reserves or giving it a secondary function, like national landscape parks or drinking water supply area, it is not easy to find alternative users for the land presently managed by farmers. At the same time, many urban companies or families are vainly looking for building lots away from our ‘compact urban areas’. This paper explores a way to bring this supply and demand together in a landscape-wise more than acceptable manner: the planning concept and experiment of ‘new rural lifestyle estates’.     

Selection of sustainable projects for floodplain restoration and urban wastewater management at the lower Chubut River valley (Argentina)

Urban growth causes environmental degradation of extended areas at the coastal floodplain of the Chubut River (Argentina). We developed procedures to identify environmentally sustainable engineering projects for floodplain restoration and urban wastewater management. We addressed specific questions about considering basic hydrological knowledge, stakeholders’ interests and social acceptance, and evaluated scoring methods that would be consistent, non-redundant and robust to various weighting criteria. Our procedures followed the following steps: (1) identification of sustainability paradigms adapted to local contexts; (2) development of hydrological modeling and collection of expert and stakeholders’ judgment in order to formulate a wide palette of feasible project alternatives; (3) development of a set of indicators of environmental sustainability to evaluate the project alternatives and test of their self-consistency; (4) evaluation of the proposed projects by means of a hierarchical multivariate analysis, estimation of the indicator weights through multivariate analyses of the un-weighted judgment scores, and reduction of the redundancy incurred during project evaluation. Finally, we identified a small set of highly ranked project alternatives to achieve floodplain restoration and sustainable urban wastewater management in the area and tested the obtained ranks for sensitivity and robustness to eventual bias in the estimation of environmental scores. We discuss the methodological developments presented in this study and their eventual application to similar landscape and urban planning scenarios.     

Continuous accountability for acceptable building performance

Complexities in building technology when not fully understood, have resulted in a less than favorable aggregate impact on the building's environment. A surprisingly high portion of U.S. non-industrial buildings do not provide satisfactory task environments. Developments in computer technology have infused new thought processes in the way we plan, design, build and operate our buildings. This paper proposes a social and technical use of Knowledge-based-systems (KBS) for continuous accountability to assure healthy buildings. Diagnostics, as an emerging discipline in building design and operation, is also discussed. A proposed framework for such accountability and the resulting ‘chain of custody’, that draws on the medical paradigm and associated diagnostic procedures is presented. It is suggested that KBS also be used for the development and interpretation of criteria for evaluating building performance from initial conception through design, construction and operation. Thus, KBS is expected to aid in the analysis of ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ buildings that may be ‘sick’ or ‘healthy’. It is proposed that for a building to provide satisfactory performance over its life-time, the ‘life-cycle’ concept must be modified in terms of the roles, responsibilities, and configuration of the building team, and in terms of its costing procedures.