Opportunities to reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Urban Passenger Transport Sector

This paper sets out to appraise the body of literature which has investigated the potential role of a large number of strategies designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in line with the objectives set under the Rio Convention. The paper discusses the role of (i) technological vs behavioural ‘fixes’, (ii) the changing spatial and temporal dimension of work activity, (iii) the jobshousing balance and land use, (iv) conventional and alternative fuels, and (v) pricing, charges and taxes. This review and assessment is part of an ongoing study funded by the Bureau of Transport and Communication Economics investigating the cost effectiveness of alternative ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas in Australia. We draw on a number of real experiments to illustrate the types of policies which are likely to have the greatest impact, given the cost implications

Climate social science—Any future for ‘blue sky research’ in management studies?

Summary The environmental humanities call for post-disciplinary approaches to meet the vexing problem of climate change. However, scholars have not scrutinised how management and organisation studies (MOS) could contribute to such an endeavour. This research note explores common surfaces of contact between the natural and social sciences, with the goal of unravelling the legitimate positions to speak from about climate change. The findings suggest that scholars in MOS are exposed to ecological reasoning, which undergirds underdog heroism, disciplinary confusion and a debasement of political subjectivity. As a counter strategy, I suggest that we affirm a ‘blue-sky research’ approach that would support alternative research paths and a more traditional will to know—to advance ‘climate social science’

Environment and development economics

v. ; 24 cm

[Les écoproduits agro-alimentaires en tant que caractéristiques de croyance : implications pour une stratégie de différenciation environnementale]

International audienceAux yeux des consommateurs, les caractéristiques environnementales des produits agro-alimentaires constituent un indicateur de la gestion environnementale des firmes, mais aussi et surtout un moyen d'appréhender d'autres dimensions de la qualité des produits agroalimentaires. L'auteur montre que le développement d'écoproduits agroalimentaires est étroitement lié à leur position dans une zone de crédibilité prenant en compte à la fois les caractéristiques classiques et les caractéristiques environnementales. Après avoir précisé la définition des caractéristiques de croyance et proposé une typologie, l'auteur assimile les caractéristiques environnementales des produits agro-alimentaires à des caractéristiques de croyance cachées et influentes. Ces caractéristiques de croyance stigmatisent d'importantes asymétries d'information liées aux conditions de définition, de vérification et de signalisation de l'écoproduit agro-alimentaire et favorisent l'opportunisme des agents. Suivant le type de marché considéré, marché final (vendeur-consommateur final) ou marché intermédiaire (agriculteur-acheteur de la filière), l'asymétrie informationnelle correspond respectivement à une situation de sélection adverse dans le premier cas et à une situation de risque moral dans le second. Ainsi, les firmes souhaitant se positionner sur ce type de marché doivent mettre en place des systèmes générateurs de confiance capables à la fois de convaincre les consommateurs de la crédibilité de leurs assertions environnementales en transformant des caractéristiques a priori de croyance en caractéristiques recherche/d'expérience et de jouer le rôle de barrière à l'entrée vis-à-vis d'entreprises concurrentes

Assessing Sustainability Indicators: The Need for a Criterion of "Performative Coherence"

Are beyond-GDP indicators the potential lever of a paradigmatic change? Or, on the contrary, are they the tool of legitimization of a status quo in the way societies are governed and organized? Given the political issues raised by the growing use of indicators in governance patterns, it appears crucial to distinguish, among the indicators discussed today, between those liable to bear a change in the orientation of societies and those which, in the way their are designed, encompass the roots of a system they elsewhere pretend to overcome. If indicators are adequately designed, they might be something else than the ineluctable vector of a general transposition of a managerial norms and principles to all the societal spheres. However, most of the quantification options encountered in the current debates appear inadequate to quantify sustainability in a coherent way: we have systematically observed contradictions between, on the one hand, the normative signal launched by the accounting of a dimension (such as environment, for instance) in the indicator and, on the other, the performative implications of the methodology adopted to quantify this dimension. These contradictions lead us to think about the methodological, theoretical and epistemological conditions needed to design more coherent indicators. The objective of that communication is to propose a new evaluative criterion of sustainability indicators: the "performative coherence". This criterion results from the triple perspective we adopt to address sustainability indicators. The latter are conceived as tools of convention, as the cogs of a form of governance inscribed in the mutation of the State-Statistics relationship, and as technico-theoretical constructs with empirical and normative ends, therefore being performative. We show that referring to this criterion is necessary to apprehend sustainability indicators in all their complexity. The search for the conditions of performatively coherent indicators leads us to discredit neoclassical economics and to investigate the contribution of ecological economics, by de facto shedding light on its adequacy to the complex issues of sustainability. The presentation is structured as follows. After a terminological clarification on our use of the concept of "sustainability" (Section 1), we draw a diagnostic of the debatable conceptual foundations of most of the indicators discussed today (section 2). We then develop the principle of performative coherence as a new evaluative criterion of sustainability indicators, liable to imply a change in the perception of sustainability issues through quantification (section 3). Section 4, addressing the theoretical and epistemological conditions of performative coherence, stresses the interest of a post-normal epistemological posture as the trigger towards a paradigmatic change. Such a posture raises a question of legitimacy, which is treated in section 5. Section 6 concludes