Investment in Sustainable Development: A UK Perspective on the Business and Academic Challenges

There are many legislative, stakeholder and supply chain pressures on business to be more ‘sustainable’. Universities have recognised the need for graduate knowledge and understanding of sustainable development issues. Many businesses and universities have responded and introduced Sustainable Development models into their operations with much of the current effort directed at climate change. However, as the current worldwide financial crisis slowly improves, the expectations upon how businesses operate and behave are changing. It will require improved transparency and relationships with all stakeholders, which is the essence of sustainable development. The challenges and opportunities for both business and universities are to understand the requirements of sustainable development and the transformation that is required. They should ensure that knowledge is embedded within the culture of the organisation and wider society in order to achieve a sustainable future

Discourse, policy and the environment: hegemony, statements and the analysis of UK airport expansion

Building on the work of Laclau and Mouffe and others, this article develops a distinctively poststructuralist approach to the analysis of policy discourse in the field of environmental politics. Despite advances, there remain persistent critiques of the approach. Some claim that its theoretical assumptions are either too ideational or insufficiently attuned to the linguistic aspect of discourse analysis. Others pinpoint methodological difficulties in operationalizing the approach and generating effective research strategies. Addressing such critiques, we seek to articulate elements of Laclau and Mouffe?s post-Marxist theory of hegemony with insights gleaned from Foucault?s archaeology of discourse, more specifically his idea of the statement. When supplemented with the logic of hegemony, we argue that describing and mapping statements of various types, as they appear and disappear, circulate and change, in relation to particular policy problems in specific historical contexts, provides vital clues for delimiting competing discursive formations. It also enables researchers to detect and explicate the underlying rules that brought them into being. We illustrate such claims through an empirical analysis of three exemplary statements in aviation policy in the United Kingdom, demonstrating how the critical evaluation of these statements offers a lens through which to examine the continuities and discontinuities of on-going hegemonic struggles

The Political Economy of the Single Supervisory Mechanism: Squaring the ‘Inconsistent Quartet’

This paper sets out to explain national preferences on the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) concerning: support for creating and participating in supranational banking supervision in the European Union; the division of competences between the European Central Bank and national banking supervisors; the nature of indirect supervision. It is argued that member states in the euro area faced a ‘financial inconsistent quartet’, whereby they could not secure at the same time: 1) financial stability, 2) financial integration, 3) national financial policies and 4) the single currency. The ‘financial inconsistent quartet’ reinforced the logic for euro area member states to create the SSM (and other elements of Banking Union) and those seeking to join the euro area to participate. However, the analytical usefulness of this concept to explain national preferences on the SSM relies upon its nuanced application to individual countries taking into account the distinct patterns in the internationalisation of national banking systems

A Search for Intrinsic Polarization in O Stars with Variable Winds

New observations of 9 of the brightest northern O stars have been made with the Breger polarimeter on the 0.9~m telescope at McDonald Observatory and the AnyPol polarimeter on the 0.4~m telescope at Limber Observatory, using the Johnson-Cousins UBVRI broadband filter system. Comparison with earlier measurements shows no clearly defined long-term polarization variability. For all 9 stars the wavelength dependence of the degree of polarization in the optical range can be fit by a normal interstellar polarization law. The polarization position angles are practically constant with wavelength and are consistent with those of neighboring stars. Thus the simplest conclusion is that the polarization of all the program stars is primarily interstellar. The O stars chosen for this study are generally known from ultraviolet and optical spectroscopy to have substantial mass loss rates and variable winds, as well as occasional circumstellar emission. Their lack of intrinsic polarization in comparison with the similar Be stars may be explained by the dominance of radiation as a wind driving force due to higher luminosity, which results in lower density and less rotational flattening in the electron scattering inner envelopes where the polarization is produced. However, time series of polarization measurements taken simultaneously with H-alpha and UV spectroscopy during several coordinated multiwavelength campaigns suggest two cases of possible small-amplitude, periodic short-term polarization variability, and therefore intrinsic polarization, which may be correlated with the more widely recognized spectroscopic variations.Comment: LaTeX2e, 22 pages including 11 tables; 12 separate gif figures; uses aastex.cls preprint package; accepted by The Astronomical Journa

The politics of Estonia’s offshore wind energy programme: Discourse, power and marine spatial planning

There is growing recognition that Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is an inherently political process marked by a clash of discourses, power and conflicts of interest. Yet there are very few attempts to make sense of and explain the political practices of MSP protests in different contexts, especially the way that planners and developers create the conditions for the articulation of objections, and then develop new strategies to negotiate and mediate community resistance. Using poststructuralist discourse theory, the article analyzes the politics of a proposed offshore wind energy (OWE) project in Estonia within the context of the country’s MSP processes. First, through the lens of politicization, it explores the strategies of political mobilization and the rival discourses of expertise and sustainability through which residents and municipal actors have contested the OWE project. Secondly, through the lens of depoliticization, it explains the discursive and legalistic strategies employed by developers, planners and an Administrative Court to displace – spatially and temporally – the core issues of contestation, thus legitimizing the OWE plan. We argue that the spaces created by the pre-planning conjuncture offered the most conducive conditions for residents to voice concerns about the proposed project in a dialogical fashion, whereas the MSP and post-planning phases became mired in a therapeutic-style consultation, set alongside rigid and unreflexive interpretations and applications of legality. We conclude by setting out the limits of the Estonian MSP as a process for resolving conflicts, while offering an alternative model of handling such public controversies, which we call pragmatic adversarialism

Participatory politics, environmental journalism and newspaper campaigns

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 13(2), 210 - 225, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1461670X.2011.646398.This article explores the extent to which approaches to participatory politics might offer a more useful alternative to understanding the role of environmental journalism in a society where the old certainties have collapsed, only to be replaced by acute uncertainty. This uncertainty not only generates acute public anxiety about risks, it has also undermined confidence in the validity of long-standing premises about the ideal role of the media in society and journalistic professionalism. The consequence, this article argues, is that aspirations of objective reportage are outdated and ill-equipped to deal with many of the new risk stories environmental journalism covers. It is not a redrawing of boundaries that is needed but a wholesale relocation of our frameworks into approaches better suited to the socio-political conditions and uncertainties of late modernity. The exploration of participatory approaches is an attempt to suggest one way this might be done

Banning the bulb: institutional evolution and the phased ban of incandescent lighting in Germany

Much academic attention has been directed at analysing energy efficiency investments through the lens of ‘behavioural failure’. These studies have challenged the neoclassical framing of regulation which emphasises the efficiency benefits of price based policy, underpinned by the notion of rational individual self-mastery. The increasing use of a regulatory ban on electric lamps in many countries is one of the most recent and high profile flash points in this dialectic of ‘freedom-versus-the-state’ in the public policy discourse. This paper interrogates this debate through a study of electric lamp diffusion in Germany. It is argued that neoclassical theory and equilibrium analysis is inadequate as a tool for policy analysis as it takes the formation of market institutions, such as existing regulations, for granted. Further still, it may be prone to encourage idealistic debates around such grand narratives which may in practice simply serve those who benefit most from the status quo. Instead we argue for an evolutionary approach which we suggest offers a more pragmatic framing tool which focuses on the formation of market institutions in light of shifting social norms and political goals—in our case, progress towards energy efficiency and environmental goals