Progress in global climate change politics? Reasserting national state territoriality in a 'post-political' world

This paper builds on previous geographical and social science work at the boundaries of climate change by (re)asserting the significance of the territoriality of the national state in global climate negotiations. Using the post-political consensus as a theoretical framework and drawing upon examples from climate change negotiations like Kyoto and Copenhagen, it argues that it is too premature to fetishize the consensus of, and collectivism between, national states in global climate politics. As geographers, ‘territoriality’, both as a material and discursive device, is fundamental in, and constitutive of, how we interpret and understand climate change and the politics thereof

Sustainability, the voluntary sector and local governance in East Yorkshire

This dissertation examines the role played by Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) groups in contributing to the governance of sustainable development. The research involves an intensive case study of VCS groups in Hull and East Riding, East Yorkshire, focusing upon Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs), Local Biodiversity Partnerships (LBPs) and Service Delivery Mechanisms (SDMs) such as Compacts. Drawing on approaches to governmentality and scalar politics, it investigates the VCS-state governance relationship, tensions around local sustainability governance, and the scalar political processes by which VCS groups promote sustainable development. Research methods are based on secondary data sources and semi-structured interviews.The study seeks an integration of approaches to 'governmentality', communicative action, partnership, power, networks and scales. It finds that state-regulated spaces of governance in the form of LSPs offer VCS groups limited recourse in which to promote their own particular discourses surrounding sustainable development. This is because VCS membership of such spaces is led by local government, who favour public service delivery and socio-economic discourses over environmental ones. As such, certain VCS groups only have regulated freedom and limited support in such spaces. VCS groups find it difficult to align their developmental aims with the objectives of local stateregulated governance spaces. This is exemplified through a tension between autonomy and capacity building within the VCS, with the state continually encroaching upon the legitimacy of an autonomous VCS, free from state interference. On one hand, some VCS groups seek to deliver particular sustainability objectives and win favour with local government by adapting to the public service delivery modus operandi of a 'congested state'. Through strategically aligning themselves with state-influenced networks of sustainability governance, these groups forfeit some of their independence surrounding sustainability objectives.On the other hand, other VCS groups form external, non-state controlled governance networks. In this process, they engage with higher scales of state territoriality and governance, particularly the region, to pursue their own independent sustainability objectives at the local level. Conversely, the regional state scale serves as a buffer, whereby central government can regulate 'at distance' how VCS groups promote sustainability. These findings contribute new insights into the ways in which local spaces of sustainability governance are produced and contested within wider state modernisation and rescaling processes

Bridging science and traditional knowledge to assess cumulative impacts of stressors on ecosystem health

Cumulative environmental impacts driven by anthropogenic stressors lead to disproportionate effects on indigenous communities that are reliant on land and water resources. Understanding and counteracting these effects requires knowledge from multiple sources. Yet the combined use of Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Scientific Knowledge (SK) has both technical and philosophical hurdles to overcome, and suffers from inherently imbalanced power dynamics that can disfavour the very communities it intends to benefit. In this article, we present a ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach for co-producing and blending knowledge about ecosystem health by using an adapted Bayesian Belief Network for the Slave River and Delta region in Canada's Northwest Territories. We highlight how bridging TK and SK with a combination of field data, interview transcripts, existing models, and expert judgement can address key questions about ecosystem health when considerable uncertainty exists. SK indicators (e.g., bird counts, mercury in fish, water depth) were graded as moderate, whereas TK indicators (e.g., bird usage, fish aesthetics, changes to water flow) were graded as being poor in comparison to the past. SK indicators were predominantly spatial (i.e., comparing to other locations) while the TK indicators were predominantly temporal (i.e., comparing across time). After being populated by 16 experts (local harvesters, Elders, governmental representatives, and scientists) using both TK and SK, the model output reported low probabilities that the social-ecological system is healthy as it used to be. We argue that it is novel and important to bridge TK and SK to address the challenges of environmental change such as the cumulative impacts of multiple stressors on ecosystems and the services they provide. This study presents a critical social-ecological tool for widening the evidence-base to a more holistic understanding of the system dynamics of multiple environmental stressors in ecosystems and for developing more effective knowledge-inclusive partnerships between indigenous communities, researchers and policy decision-makers. This represents new transformational empirical insights into how wider knowledge discourses can contribute to more effective adaptive co-management governance practices and solutions for the resilience and sustainability of ecosystems in Northern Canada and other parts of the world with strong indigenous land tenure