The article analyzes sustainable rural development as development of rural localities that promotes progressive and effective management of resources, in coordination of their protection and ...sustainable usage with regard to requirements set in different areas (economics, social development, culture, law and environmental protection). The natural resources’ sorts, functions and indicators related to usage of natural resources are described. The strengths and weaknesses of environmental changes, the solution possibilities of the sorest problems and probable threats are named. The essential attention is given to the main components of the environment – air, water, climate, landscape, and problems of biological diversity. The article stresses the sustainable development of natural resources through strategic usage of natural resources that is beneficial to rural localities and residents. The described research was carried out in Zasliai eldership of Kaisiadorys region (Lithuania) and in Siedlce Municipality of Siedlce Poviat (Poland). The condition of its natural resources, management tools and significance for sustainable development of the locality were assessed. The improvement directions of management of natural resources in the eldership were named and substantiated with regard to the components of sustainable development (economic, environmental protection and social-cultural).
Protected areas (PAs) form the backbone of European biodiversity-conservation efforts. Despite extensive PA coverage in many countries on the Continent, biodiversity is declining throughout Europe. ...According to international scientific studies, PA management schemes often fail because benefits for local people are not realised, and their participation is neglected. However, despite the development of integrated PA concepts such as biosphere reserves and nature parks, instances of PA failure are regularly reported, suggesting factors other than the mere selection of integrated concepts. In order to identify such factors, a qualitative meta-analysis of 20 case studies from 10 European countries was conducted. It was generally found that though providing benefits for and involving local people are important success factors, the prevailing socio-economic and political conditions have the potential to prevent management success. While this parallels other studies that caution to view certain paradigms of area protection as a panacea and call for closer attention to the existing conditions, another important factor was identified: the perceptions and attitudes of the local people and of PA managers. They may affect PA management success through restricting opportunities and support for adequate benefits and participation processes. Therefore, it is essential to gain knowledge on both the conditions and the perceptions and attitudes. Here, socio-ecological monitoring appears to be an important means of gaining this kind of knowledge and evaluating it. This will eventually engender adaptive learning processes that accommodate the complexity of social-ecological systems and their biocultural diversity.
Since the early 1990s a number of projects have developed indexes to measure vulnerability to environmental change. This article investigates the key conceptual and methodological problems associated ...with such indexes. It examines in detail an index that explicitly addresses environmental change as an issue of vulnerability, the Environmental Vulnerability Index (EVI) developed by the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC). This examination offers some broader lessons for indicator-based projects, all of which require a simple model of complex and uncertain social-ecological systems, and entail difficult choices about the selection, standardization, weighting, and aggregation of indicators selected to represent important aspects of those systems. We conclude that indexes of vulnerability to environmental change cannot hope to be meaningful when applied to large-scale systems, and so should focus on smaller scales of analysis. We argue that they should not be used as the basis for disbursing funds, comparing countries, or for measuring the performance of countries in environmental management. We also argue that vulnerability is a context-specific rather than a generic condition. Finally, we suggest that because vulnerability is about values at risk, there should be more input from a broader array of people when indexes are being developed and tested.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the extent and quality of voluntarily disclosed information regarding intellectual capital (IC) are correlated with certain characteristics of a ...company. IC is very important for IT companies. Therefore, financial and non-financial statements of 32 high-tech companies were investigated using the content analysis method. To test the influence of firm characteristics on the intellectual capital disclosure index (ICDI), the regression model was used. The size of the firm was the only independent variable that has had a statistically significant influence on the ICDI. The auditor type, as well as financial ratios, have not shown a statistically significant influence on the extent and quality of IC disclosures. This study reflects the state regarding the voluntary IC disclosures in Croatia and therefore the study may be a roadmap for further research and, more importantly, might promote awareness of the importance of transparent reporting.
Growing numbers of fee-paying ‘volunteers’ leave the UK each year to work on international nature conservation projects. Powerful advocates argue that such volunteering offers active global ...environmental citizens the opportunity to make a difference, delivering public services through a politically and economically appealing model of social enterprise. This paper reviews the geographies of citizenship performed in international conservation volunteering from the UK to critically examine these claims. It draws on and develops three conceptual approaches from political geography. First, it examines international conservation volunteering as a mode of cosmopolitan global environmental citizenship, guided by the universal framework of natural science across a flat earth of difference making opportunities. Second, it reviews the material reality of conservation volunteering as an illustration of the neoliberal and neo-colonial tendencies within mainstream global environmentalism. Third, it moves beyond these familiar theoretical tropes to present a more-than-human account of international conservation volunteering from the UK. This attends to the material assemblages of human and nonhuman bodies, practices and affects caught up in within these expressions of citizenship. In conclusion the paper critically compares the different materialisations of citizenship offered by these approaches. It finds that the geographies of citizenship performed within the sector are neither ‘global’ or ‘environmental’, nor do they comprise modes of citizenship that embody planetary humanism or panoptic rationalism. Instead, the modes, subjects and spatialities of citizenship performed here are asymmetric, affective and more-than-human. This has important implications for the scope, practices and future of international environmental politics and for the emerging sub-discipline of the geographies of citizenship.
The growing influence of neoliberal approaches to environmental governance has significantly increased the involvement of industry non-state actors in international and national climate governance. ...However, the implications of this neoliberalisation and hybridisation of climate governance, and particularly state-industry relations during these processes, remain under-integrated with wider geographical debates on the scalar and network politics of environmental governance. In this paper, we probe these issues by examining the regulatory and territorial logics underpinning the negotiation and implementation of the European Union emissions trading scheme (EU ETS). We argue that overlapping interpretations of the regulatory logic of emissions trading (as a costeffective means of meeting climate objectives) by EU, state and industry actors provided the driving force for the creation of a Europeanised climate governance space and the consolidation of the EU's governing authority in respect of the formal rulemaking elements of the EU ETS. However, alliances between state and industry actors, based around intersecting interpretations of their territorial interests in relation to emissions trading, strongly influenced the scheme's design. Moreover, speculative behaviour within the EU ETS market indicates the continued ability of market networks to disrupt territorially-based climate governance regimes. We argue that critical exploration of the territorial logics and practices of EU emissions trading from regime creation to operation provides new insights into the emerging spatial politics of neoliberal environmental governance and its implications for climate protection.
The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, ...this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.
The importance of extending physically based approaches to catchment management to include social considerations has recently been highlighted alongside increasing legislative pressure to utilise ...public participation in river management processes. Nine water managers, operating at varying geographical scales, from the UK and north-west Europe were interviewed to determine their approach to, opinion of, and success in utilising public participation for decisionmaking. The results indicate that despite variations in approaches to, and perceptions of, participation, one dominant factor constrained the use of higher level participation: scale. The results demonstrate that the degree of participation and influence for 'non-certified' experts was inversely proportional to the scale of the project. This was attributed to issues of practicality in communicating between a large number of individuals, but also to underlying factors such as availability of financial support and governing regulations that differ between organisations of different sizes. The findings were used to consider the role of Callon's public education, public debate and co-production of knowledge models of scientific knowledge production (Callon 1999). It is suggested that, for practical application, traditional models be developed into more reflexive approaches that account for the complexity of real-world situations.
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