Climate challenges, ecological modernization and technological forcing: policy lessons from a comparative US-EU analysis

The practice of “technological forcing,” understood as policy designed to accelerate technological innovation for the purposes of environmental protection, was pioneered in the USA during the 1970s and continued in Europe with feed-in tariffs for renewable energy and the emissions trading scheme. In order to draw lessons for climate policy, the article tests the capacity of “technological forcing” to translate ecological modernization theory into effective policy and practice, by providing analysis of three case studies. It argues that ambitious climate policies require not only technical proficiency in policy design, but also greater acknowledgment of the need to achieve structural change in major industrial sectors. It concludes that technology-based policies need to be accompanied by economic and political strategies to counteract incumbent resistance, and delineates potential means to do so. </jats:p

From inadvertent to reluctant pioneer? Climate strategies and policy style in France

To comply with the Kyoto Protocol, signatory nations have implemented a policy template of reducing greenhouse gas emissions mainly from the electricity generation and heavy industry sectors. This article shows how, in the case of France, a policy style based on `environmental meso-corporatism' has largely exhausted this `standard recipe'. To consider how far France has developed fresh solutions, two phases of climate policy-making in the 2000s are analysed. Increased recourse to new environmental policy instruments is identified, but implemented through the institutional routines of `environmental meso-corporatism'. The article argues that although this policy style has proved relatively well adapted to regulating the technologies of production, it has little purchase on cultures of consumption within the residential and transport sectors. Faced with new challenges, policymakers have proved better equipped to reform policy content than policy style. But France shows some reluctance to resolve the problem of limited policy reach

From Climate Advocacy to Public Engagement: An Exploration of the Roles of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations

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Isolation and characterization of Cyclin and Cyclin-dependent Kinase homologues from Brassica napus

Bibliography: p. 229-255