The Western Australian regional forest agreement: economic rationalism and the normalisation of political closure

This article explores the constraints imposed by economic rationalism on environmental policy-making in light of Western Australia\u27s (WA) Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) experience. Data derived from interviews with WA RFA stakeholders shed light on their perceptions of the RFA process and its outcomes. The extent to which involvement of science and the public RFA management enabled is analysed. The findings point to a pervasive constrainedness of WA\u27s RFA owing to a closing of the process by the administrative decision-making structures. A dominant economic rationality is seen to have normalised and legitimised political closure, effectively excluding rationalities dissenting from an implicit economic orthodoxy. This article argues for the explication of invisible, economic constraints affecting environmental policy and for the public-cum-political negotiation of the points of closure within political processes

[Book Review] A cultural history of climate, by Wolfgang Behringer

International audienceAs Chakrabarty points out in his presentation "Between Globalization and Global Warming: The Long and the Short of Human History" [available in the University of Chicago International and Area Studies Multimedia Outreach Source archive], historians have only just begun to enter the climate change debate. This is my review of one of or perhaps even THE first full-length monograph, translated from the German, to address climate change from a historian's perspective. While I found the book original and interesting, I criticize it for a 'whiggish view of progress' in which challenge after challenge is overcome inevitably by the increasing power of human rationality. I find it ironic to argue that this dialectic will solve our climate change problems, when it seems to me to be more or less what got us into them