Markets, Institutions and Sustainability

Encouraging and stimulating markets for new and innovative environmental goods and services is crucial to move our economy towards sustainability. Formal legislation, government policies, and price mechanisms alone, are not however, sufficient to guarantee the development of new markets. This paper demonstrates the importance of market participants developing their own ‘rules of the game’, their own sets of informal practices, routines, and institutions to make the market work. A case study on Australia’s successfully developing wind energy market is utilised to illustrate these market processes in action. Market ‘emergence’ or market ‘creation’ is explored from an institutional and evolutionary perspective. The first section is dedicated to elaborating the markets as institutions perspective whilst theoretical insights into how markets as institutions might emerge are detailed in the second section. In the third section institutional emergence of the wind energy market in Australia is explained by means of a theoretical framework developed from the case study. The research points to unique market behaviours, committed buyer-seller relationships, learned exchange capabilities, and institutionalised market practices as necessary features of successfully emergent markets. The paper concludes with directions to support new market development for environmental sustainability.Market, Institution, Emergence, Learning, Exchange

Particle Resuspension in Turbulent Boundary Layers and the Influence of Non-Gaussian Removal Forces

The work described is concerned with the way micron-size particles attached to a surface are resuspended when exposed to a turbulent flow. An improved version of the Rock'n'Roll model (Reeks and Hall, 2001) is developed where this model employs a stochastic approach to resuspension involving the rocking and rolling of a particle about surface asperities arising from the moments of the fluctuating drag forces acting on the particle close to the surface. In this work, the model is improved by using values of both the streamwise fluid velocity andacceleration close to the wall obtained from Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of turbulentchannel flow. Using analysis and numerical calculations of the drag force on a sphere near a wall in shear flow (O'Neill (1968) and Lee and Balachandar (2010)) these values are used to obtain the joint distribution of the moments of the fluctuating drag force and its time derivative acting on a particle attached to a surface. In so doing the influence of highly non-Gaussian forces (associated with the sweeping and ejection events in a turbulent boundary layer) on short and long term resuspension rates is examined for a sparse monolayer coverage of particles, along with the dependence of the resuspension upon the timescale of the particle motion attached to the surface, the ratio of the rms/ mean of the removal force and the distribution of adhesive forces. Model predictions of the fraction resuspended are compared with experimental results.Comment: 31 pages 21 figure