The study aimed to identify the relationship between rational resource management and the performance of the government sector in the Al-Jouf region. It is divided into 5 dimensions: strategy, ...discipline, justice, transparency and accountability. The second dimension (the dependent variable) represents performance, which consists of three dimensions: the financial dimension, the customer dimension, and the learning and growth dimension. A questionnaire was distributed to a sample of 245 public sector employees of the Al-Jouf region. The study sample was comprehensive, non-probabilistic and intentional. It was analyzed using the Smart PLS program. The results showed a positive relationship between the dimensions of the rational management of resources) and performance in the government sector institutions in the Al-Jouf region.
In the last decade a growing number of environmental scientists have advocated economic valuation of ecosystem services as a pragmatic short-term strategy to communicate the value of biodiversity in ...a language that reflects dominant political and economic views. This paper revisits the controversy on economic valuation of ecosystem services in the light of two aspects that are often neglected in ongoing debates. First, the role of the particular institutional setup in which environmental policy and governance is currently embedded in shaping valuation outcomes. Second, the broader economic and sociopolitical processes that have governed the expansion of pricing into previously non-marketed areas of the environment. Our analysis suggests that within the institutional setup and broader sociopolitical processes that have become prominent since the late 1980s economic valuation is likely to pave the way for the commodification of ecosystem services with potentially counterproductive effects in the long term for biodiversity conservation and equity of access to ecosystem services benefits.
The development of markets in water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration signals a new intensification and financialisation in the encounter between nature and late capitalism. Following ...Neil Smith's observations on this transformation, I argue that the commodification of such 'ecosystem services' is not merely an expansion of capital toward the acquisition or industrialisation of new resources, but the making of a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual human labours became social labour under capitalism. Technologies of measurement developed by ecosystem scientists describe nature as exchange values, as something always already encountered in the commodity form. Examining these developments through specific cases in US water policy, I propose that examining this transformation can provide political ecology and the study of 'neoliberal natures' with a thematic unity that has been absent. I understand capital's encounter with nature as a process of creating socially-necessary abstractions that are adequate to bear value in capitalist circulation. Such an argument supersedes the issue of nature's materiality and points toward a common language for the analysis of both humans and nature as two participants in the labour process. Political ecologists struggling with the commodification of nature have tended to overlook the social constitution of nature's value in favour of explicit or implicit physical theories of value, often as more-or-less latent realisms. I suggest that critical approaches to nature must retain and elaborate a critical value theory, to understand both the imperatives and the silences in the current campaign to define the world as an immense collection of service commodities.
Ecosystem services Dempsey, Jessica; Robertson, Morgan M.
Progress in human geography,
12/2012, Letnik:
36, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Across the world, governments, NGOs, scientists, policy-makers, and resource managers are learning to speak in the language of ecosystem services. It is a concept that seems to belong to what many ...geographers call neoliberal-style environmental policies. However, the policies and practices around the ecosystem service concept deviate considerably from neoliberal doctrine. Our primary aim is to open up space for informed conversation about ecosystem services in geography by exploring the internal heterogeneity and tensions within the world of ecosystem service policies. In describing these debates on their own terms, we find a diverse and wide-ranging set of actors and viewpoints.
► We explore contributions of geo-information tools to participatory spatial planning. ► We evaluate their contributions to the principles of good governance. ► We assess participatory and mobile ...GIS, and participatory 3-dimensional modelling.
The last few decades have seen increasing attempts to foster ‘collaborative’ and ‘participatory’ approaches to spatial planning and decision-making, with a more sophisticated conceptualisation of the contested term, participation. Participatory, ‘bottom-up’ geo-information technologies have been concurrently developing and these are expected to strengthen participatory spatial planning; important among these has been the transformation of conventional mapping and GIS tools into Participatory GIS (PGIS). In this paper we explore the potential contributions of participatory geo-information tools towards participatory spatial planning, in terms of the principles and criteria of good governance. We discuss five fundamental principles of ‘good’ governance: accountability, legitimacy, respect, equity, and competence, and the potential of geo-information tools to contribute to, and detract from, such principles; although we focus especially on participation and the recognition and validation of local knowledge. We derive criteria for the five principles, and we identify a range of evaluation questions which can be operationalised so as to interrogate the criteria for judging the contribution of participatory tools and participatory spatial planning activities. We conclude by summarily assessing the potentials of participatory geo-information tools, particularly participatory mobile GIS, participatory 3-dimensional modelling, and visualisation features in PGIS.
Current policies and practices in biodiversity conservation have been increasingly influenced by neoliberal approaches since the 1990s. The authors focus on the principle of transparency as a ...self-proclaimed basis of neoliberal environmental governance, and on the role of standardized science-based measurements which it purportedly affords. The authors introduce the term ‘measurementality’ to signify the governance logic that emerges when transparency comes to stand next to effectiveness and efficiency as neoliberal principles and to highlight the connections that are forged between economic, managerial, and technocratic discourses. The example of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is used to discuss the role of measurementality in global biodiversity governance. The analysis suggests that IPBES aims to coordinate the science–policy interface in order to optimize the generation of user-friendly knowledge of those elements of biodiversity that are considered politically and economically relevant: At the current economic juncture, these being in essence ecosystem services. Based on these findings, the authors proceed by critically reflecting on the ways in which the measurementality logic of IPBES may not only result in an impoverishment of the biodiversity research agenda, but also in an impoverished understanding of biodiversity itself. To conclude, the authors argue that measurementality is part and parcel of the neoliberal paradigm in which science produces the raw materials for subsequent control and exchange and that, as a result, the intersection of science, discourse, policy, and economics within these governance systems requires sustained critical scrutiny.
This paper seeks to develop an alternative account of the geographies of environmental governance to those current conceptions which tend to take space and scale for granted as pre-given, contained, ...natural entities. Through an engagement with the debates on the politics of scale, the argument is made that a new spatial grammar of environmental governance must be sensitive to both the politics of scale and the politics of networks. Rather than considering scalar and non-scalar interpretations of spatiality as necessarily opposite, the paper argues that through a more careful deployment of concepts of hierarchy and territory common ground between scalar and network geographies can be forged, and can inform our understanding of environmental governance. In making this argument, the paper provides an overview of contemporary configurations of global environmental governance, and seeks to illustrate by reference to one transnational municipal network, the Cities for Climate Protection programme, how governing the environment involves both political processes of scaling and rescaling the objects and agents of governance, as well as attempts to create new, networked, arenas of governance. The paper concludes that recognition of new spatial grammars is necessary for understanding emerging hybrid forms of environmental governance and their political and ecological implications.
This paper critically explores the politics that mediate the use of environmental science assessments as the basis of resource management policy. Drawing on recent literature in the political ecology ...tradition that has emphasised the politicised nature of the production and use of scientific knowledge in environmental management, the paper analyses a hydrological assessment in a small river basin in Chile, undertaken in response to concerns over the possible overexploitation of groundwater resources. The case study illustrates the limitations of an approach based predominantly on hydrogeological modelling to ascertain the effects of increased groundwater abstraction. In particular, it identifies the subjective ways in which the assessment was interpreted and used by the state water resources agency to underpin water allocation decisions in accordance with its own interests, and the role that a desocialised assessment played in reproducing unequal patterns of resource use and configuring uneven waterscapes. Nevertheless, as Chile's 'neoliberal' political-economic framework privileges the role of science and technocracy, producing other forms of environmental knowledge to complement environmental science is likely to be contentious. In conclusion, the paper considers the potential of mobilising the concept of the hydrosocial cycle to further critically engage with environmental science. All rights reserved, Elsevier
: While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well‐being and social justice. We ...posit a basic framework by which to understand the range of political possibilities, in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The framework also suggests some possible means through which these responses might be thwarted, and political stakes in that construction of a new hegemony—which, to avoid suggesting we know or can yet determine the form it will take, we call “climate X”.
The circular economy is entirely in line with the European Commission’s long-term strategy aimed at moving toward an economy without any climate impact by 2050 (European Commission, 2018). Yet, to ...our knowledge, there is little work that analyzes the impact of the circular economy on CO2 emissions in Europe. The objective of this study is to analyze, at the level of the European Union (EU-15), the impact of the circular economy on CO2 emissions using an Autoregressive-Distributed Lag model (ARDL). The results of the study over the period 2000-2015 show that, in the long term, circular economy practices tend to reduce CO2 emissions, while in the short term, the effect is the opposite. The short-term results also question the modalities of our economic growth and the need to find a consensus between “efficiency and sufficiency” in order to limit resource consumption and CO2 emissions.
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