The Allure of Technology: How France and California Promoted Electric Vehicles to Reduce Urban Air Pollution

All advanced industrialized societies face the problem of air pollution produced by motor vehicles. In spite of striking improvements in internal combustion engine technology, air pollution in most urban areas is still measured at levels determined to be harmful to human health. Throughout the 1990s and beyond, California and France both chose to improve air quality by means of technological innovation, adopting legislation that promoted clean vehicles, prominently among them, electric vehicles (EVs). In California, policymakers chose a technology-forcing approach, setting ambitious goals (e.g., zero emission vehicles), establishing strict deadlines and issuing penalties for non-compliance. The policy process in California called for substantial participation from the public, the media, the academic community and the interest groups affected by the regulation. The automobile and oil industries bitterly contested the regulation, in public and in the courts. In contrast, in France the policy process was non-adversarial, with minimal public participation and negligible debate in academic circles. We argue that California's stringent regulation spurred the development of innovative hybrid and fuel cell vehicles more effectively than the French approach. However, in spite of the differences, both California and France have been unable to put a substantial number of EVs on the road. Our comparison offers some broad lessons about how policy developments within a culture influence both the development of technology and the impact of humans on the environment.Environmental policy, Electric vehicles, Air pollution, Technology policy, Sustainable transport

The potential of ecosystem services as an approach for marine stakeholder engagement

With growing human pressures on the oceans and seas, the resulting decline of ecosystem health and biodiversity is increasingly limiting the ability of marine ecosystems to provide essential functions and resources for human wellbeing. To prevent further marine degradation, an ecosystem based approach to marine management is needed. An integral part of this is constructive stakeholder engagement. However, in a marine context, engagement is often difficult due to traditionally sectoral management and the complexity of marine issues. This thesis presents an interdisciplinary study that evaluates the potential of the ecosystem services approach to support and improve marine stakeholder engagement. First, opportunities and challenges of using the approach in participatory marine management processes were explored through interviews with 39 stakeholders who participated in the application of ecosystem service assessment to marine management in six French and UK case studies. The interviews revealed that the ecosystem services approach can facilitate participatory engagement by improving understanding of complex ecological-socioeconomic systems and fostering constructive dialogue. Second, the potential of the approach for communicating marine management decisions to marine users was tested with a scenario based survey. Responses to three versions of the survey, two with and one without ecosystem services content, were compared, showing that the ecosystem services information did not increase agreement with the management measures proposed in the scenario. An evaluation of the results in the context of environmental behaviour research suggests that the novelty and complexity of the ecosystem services approach might limit its usefulness for top down communication. In contrast, if the approach is integrated in participatory processes, it was concluded that this could have multiple benefits for ecosystem based marine management. From these findings, a conceptual model was developed that provides a normative framework for the effective use of the ecosystem services approach to support constructive participatory engagement in marine governance