Private protected areas as institutional innovation in nature conservation: an empirical study on their emergence and assessment of their social and ecological fit

Private Protected Areas (PPAs) are increasingly considered a promising complement topublic-run protected areas. Their rapid proliferation worldwide and increased adoption as policy tools, have made the PPA phenomenon one of the most important in current nature protection strategies. Nevertheless, there has been little scholarly attention paid to their emergence and the implications of their implementation, especially in Europe. This dissertation explores the genesis of PPAs as innovative institutional arrangements for conservation policies and investigates their suitability for enhancing nature conservation without neglecting social issues. To begin with, an investigation into PPAs used as policy tools in European countries, showed that PPA institutional models resemble public-private partnerships that differ among countries: in the roles of public actors as regulators and facilitators for the involvement of private actors, and in the distinct typology of the latter. Hence, in countries that have centered their conservation policy on public-run protected areas and top-down approaches, PPA adoption appears to be an emblematic result of a change in governance towards voluntary approaches and partnerships with non-state actors. The research focus then shifts to Portugal, where PPA adoption clashes with the centralized top-down institutional heritage. A diachronic analysis on non-state actors’ involvement in the establishment and management of protected areas revealed that the privately governed protected areas are not a recent model within the national system of conserved areas. However, the novelty of the current model lies in its emergence against a backdrop of conservation governance rescaling and restructuring and the professionalization of NGOs, which has resulted in access to international funding for conservation. The subsequent research line aims to question the suitability of PPAs to protect nature in a socially just way, challenging a dichotomous viewpoint, alternatively presenting PPAs as a panacea or rejecting them altogether as neoliberal techniques. To do so, we developed a multicriteria assessment framework, which draws on the concepts of social and ecological institutional fit and is underpinned by a socio-ecological system approach. This framework is applied to the case of the Faia Brava natural reserve. Our findings suggest that the current Portuguese PPA institutional model, is unable to avoid the (re)production of some of the drawbacks and social issues usually associated with topdown regulations in public-run protected areas, nor to elude the risk of advancing a neoliberal conservation. The main issues to be addressed include the risk of allowing a concentration of land to be placed into the hands of private actors without guarantee of long-term protection; the lack of recognition criteria aimed to target the most endangered sites; the lack of public funding that would avoid a tendency towards nature commodification. Alongside the development of the socio-ecological assessment tool, this dissertation provides new insights into the debate on the government to governance shift in nature conservation, with empirical contributions regarding the institutional arrangements and practices of PPAs. An additional key contribution, with respect to the overarching research approach, is a reflection on the meta-theoretical bases offered by Critical Realism, to advance our understanding of policy change and socio-ecological systems.As Áreas Protegidas Privadas (APPs) são consideradas um complemento promissor às áreas protegidas públicas. A sua rápida proliferação como ferramentas das políticas de conservação da natureza, tornaram o fenómeno das APPs um dos mais importantes a nível mundial em termos de estratégias de proteção ambiental. Contudo, há poucos estudos sobre o seu surgimento e as consequências da sua implementação, especialmente na Europa. Esta dissertação explora a génese das APPs como modelos de inovação institucional no contexto das políticas de conservação e investiga a adequação dos mesmos para uma preservação da natureza integradora das questões sociais. Começou-se por explorar as APPs como instrumento de política pública em países Europeus. O estudo comparativo mostrou que as APPs têm características de parcerias público-privadas e diferem pela configuração do papel do ator público, como regulador e facilitador do envolvimento de atores privados, e pela tipologia destes últimos. Em países que centraram a sua política de conservação na implementação de áreas protegidas públicas e em abordagens de cima para baixo, a adoção das APPs parece emblemática de uma mudança no sentido da promoção de abordagens voluntárias e parcerias com atores privados. Seguidamente, a investigação centrou-se em Portugal, onde a adoção das APPs colide com uma tradição de administração pública centralizada. Uma análise diacrônica sobre o envolvimento de atores não estatais (i.e. administração central) no estabelecimento e gestão de áreas protegidas, revelou que as APPs não são, contudo, uma alternativa recente. A novidade do modelo atual situa-se no seu surgimento no contexto de uma reestruturação da governança da conservação e da profissionalização das ONGs, e.g. no acesso a financiamentos internacionais. A linha de pesquisa subsequente questionou a capacidade das APPs de levar a cabo a sua função de proteção da natureza de maneira socialmente justa, desafiando um debate dicotômico, que as apresenta alternativamente ou como uma panaceia ou as rejeita por completo como soluções neoliberais. Para isso, desenvolveu-se uma ferramenta de avaliação multicritério baseada no conceito de encaixe institucional e sustentada por uma abordagem socio-ecológica. O enquadramento desenvolvido foi aplicado ao caso de estudo da reserva natural da Faia Brava. Esta investigação sugere que o atual modelo português para as APPs não é capaz de evitar a (re)produção de conflitos e problemas sociais associados às áreas protegidas públicas, nem evitar o risco de emergência de uma abordagem neoliberal de conservação da natureza. As principais questões incluem o risco de concentração de terras nas mãos de atores privados sem garantia de proteção da natureza a longo prazo; a falta de critérios de reconhecimento de APPs que privilegie os sítios mais ameaçados; e a falta de financiamento público destinado a evitar a mercantilização da natureza. Para além do desenvolvimento desta ferramenta de avaliação, contribui-se para o debate sobre a mudança do modelo de governança da conservação da natureza em Portugal, com contributos empíricos sobre modelos e práticas das APPs. Um contributo adicional é uma reflexão sobre as bases meta-teóricas que o Realismo Crítico oferece para avançar o nosso entendimento sobre as mudanças nas políticas públicas e nos sistemas socioecológicos

The localist turn in EU Regional Policy viewed from a Tuscan Perspective

At a time in which European governments and senior officials are striving to find an agreement on the grand objectives for the new Lisbon strategy, scant attention has been dedicated so far to main economic policy of the European Union: the Regional Policy. The present work critically investigates the rationales and the intervention tools which shape the EU’s flagship policy, with a view to shedding light on the transformations which have lately affected the politics of local development in Europe. The analysis will focus on the thematic and pragmatic relationship which links together Regional Policy and new regionalist theorisations. It will highlight how, by embracing an endogenous and punctuated definition of development, the Regional Policy has fashioned an institutional framework in which regions are enrolled as self-contained action units, and are expected to compete against each other to secure their economic prosperity. Drawing on relational perspectives, I will contend that this approach is doubly problematic. From a substantive point of view, it leads to a prioritisation of local links, which fails to recognise the multifaceted spatialities characterising modern economic relations. In procedural terms, the institutional mechanisms involved in the Regional Policy encourage a “regional centralism” which, in the name of EU funds, compresses dissent and “technicalises” political choices. These arguments will be empirically scrutinized through a study of the innovation policy implemented in Tuscany under the Structural Funds. Methodologically, the inquiry has a bi-focal nature: on the one hand, I will rely on official evaluation reports to assess the effectiveness of new regionalist policy schemes; on the other hand, I will reconstruct regional governance dynamics, by tracing how a certain policy concept (innovation networks) has been adopted by the EU, translated at the local level, and finally consolidated in a set of institutional relations, expectations and power asymmetries. The heuristic hypothesis is that only by combining the two research levels it will be possible to grasp the direction and the significance of the political project pursued by the European Commission through the Regional Policy

Mobilizing city-regional urbanization: The political economy of transportation and the Production of the metropolis in Chicago and Toronto

Studies of cities and urbanization are confronted with significant theoretical and methodological challenges as the urban question is reposed at the city-regional scale. Normative understandings of city-regions as sites of economic innovation and distinct political actors on the world stage belie the complex processes underlying their production. This has significant implications for social justice and political practice. This dissertation engages the challenges of city-regional urbanization through a critical comparative analysis of urban transportation institutions and infrastructure in the Chicago and Toronto city-regions. Focusing on long-term historical and spatial structures, the study demonstrates how multiscalar political, economic and social processes crystallize in specific urban formations and in tum, how processes of urbanization shape urban governance and practices of everyday life. The dissertation develops three central theoretical innovations. First, it introduces a geographical historical-materialist comparative framework to examine the contingent evolution of city-regional formations in space and across time using a cross-national perspective. Second, it reframes urban transportation as a key realm of political economy inquiry, redressing the limitations of traditional transportation geography and the poststructural approaches which dominate urban infrastructures literature. Third, it incorporates diverse urban, suburban and post-suburban spaces within an overarching theorization of city-regional urbanization as an expression of centripetal and centrifugal forces. Qualitative methods are used to uncover and analyze socially-entangled and geographically-disparate urban relations. The empirical analysis reveals that the prioritization of particular scales of mobility spurs the emergence of new city-regional topologies which do not neatly align with territorially-defined forms of state space. Strategies of regionalization are as likely to open new fissures in city-regional space as they are to fuse collective regional agency. The convergences and divergences witnessed between the Chicago and Toronto city-regions illustrate the place-specific path dependent properties of institutional and infrastructure fixes that highlight the importance of historically and geographically sensitive comparative research. The dissertation's dialectical and comparative contributions open the city-region as a multifaceted, multiscalar and multilayered object of analysis. It concludes by outlining how the study's dialectical approach to city-regional urbanization can inform debates on urban transformation and social change

Climate Change Governance and the Politics of Scale: Evaluating Local Climate Protection Policies and Practices in the United States and Germany

When it became evident that the issue of climate change needed to be acted upon, it was projected as a global scale problem. To make this rhetoric concrete, the international relations logic that ‘regimes’ of cooperating nation-states are the most feasible approach to solving problems that are global in nature was adopted. While the national level has performed poorly in climate change mitigation action, as exemplified by the United States’ refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, Canada’s subsequent withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol in 2011 after initial ratification and, more recently, the United States withdrawal from the Paris Accord, a reconfiguration of the scalar context of climate change governance to the local scale has become more popular. The major sources and sinks of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) are deemed to be at the local scale; hence, it is considered as the most suitable spatial unit for climate mitigation action. However, for local climate action to replace aggressive national level actions in fulfillment of the commitments to the ‘regime’ of cooperating national governments, the number of local climate policy innovation, and depth and efficacy of individual local actions must be substantial. In fulfillment of its first core empirical objective, the study combined critical policy theory, qualitative interviews and Geographic Information Systems, to examine the innovation of local climate action plans in the United States. Relying on the policy documents, the web-pages and progress reports of localities’ climate action efforts, and in-depth interviews with climate protection managers of 21 and five local governments in the United States and Germany respectively, the second empirical exercise examined the efficacy of local climate efforts quantitatively, in terms of their Greenhouse Gas emissions reduction targets, and qualitatively, in terms of the challenges and opportunities in their efforts

Feature Papers of Water Resources Management, Policy and Governance

Water resource management includes the consideration of all disciplines of hydrology and water sources. Water supplies are allocated and diverted to cover the water needs of a range of agricultural, municipal, industrial, hydro-electrical, and ecological water uses. These water uses are, usually, very competitive, as the available water resources are limited and it is not possible to cover the total water needs in a basin, requiring the setting of water use priorities to best serve societal and ecological needs. To manage the water resources and waterworks may, sometimes, lead to confrontational deliberations and negotiations. As a result, water resource management is one of the world’s greatest challenges due to competition for limited resources, regional disparities in water supply and affluence, mounting global water demand, aquifer depletion, and pollution- and climate-change-induced water stress. Proper policy and governance for sustainable water resource management is essential and require new fresh ideas, innovation, and international cooperation. This book includes seven papers by invited renowned researchers and engineers to cover issues of water resource management, governance, and policy. These issues include the following topics: Integrated water resource management; Water resource systems and water availability; National and international water policy, institutional arrangements, and water law; Water conflict resolution, public participation, and decision making; Water resource management, policy and governance in socially and environmentally sensitive areas and regions

Analyzing Granger causality in climate data with time series classification methods

Attribution studies in climate science aim for scientifically ascertaining the influence of climatic variations on natural or anthropogenic factors. Many of those studies adopt the concept of Granger causality to infer statistical cause-effect relationships, while utilizing traditional autoregressive models. In this article, we investigate the potential of state-of-the-art time series classification techniques to enhance causal inference in climate science. We conduct a comparative experimental study of different types of algorithms on a large test suite that comprises a unique collection of datasets from the area of climate-vegetation dynamics. The results indicate that specialized time series classification methods are able to improve existing inference procedures. Substantial differences are observed among the methods that were tested

Industrial Symbiosis Recommender Systems

For a long time, humanity has lived upon the paradigm that the amounts of natural resources are unlimited and that the environment has ample regenerative capacity. However, the notion to shift towards sustainability has resulted in a worldwide adoption of policies addressing resource efficiency and preservation of natural resources.One of the key environmental and economic sustainable operations that is currently promoted and enacted in the European Union policy is Industrial Symbiosis. In industrial symbiosis, firms aim to reduce the total material and energy footprint by circulating traditional secondary production process outputs of firms to become part of an input for the production process of other firms.This thesis directs attention to the design considerations for recommender systems in the highly dynamic domain of industrial symbiosis. Recommender systems are a promising technology that may facilitate in multiple facets of the industrial symbiosis creation as they reduce the complexity of decision making. This typical strength of recommender systems has been responsible for improved sales and a higher return of investments. That provides the prospect for industrial symbiosis recommenders to increase the number of synergistic transactions that reduce the total environmental impact of the process industry in particular