'Energy democracy' epitomizes hopes in energy transformation, but remains under-defined, a political buzzword rather than a real concept. After presenting its activist roots and mapping its usage, ...'energy democracy' is positioned in relation to similar normatively derived concepts: environmental, climate, and energy justice, and environmental democracy. Drawing on insights from political theory and political sociology, it is shown what is democratic in energy democracy. Referencing the question of experts and democratic publics in complex technological areas, the paper explains why it is desirable for energy governance to be more democratic. To show what is unique in 'energy democracy' beyond increased participation in energy policy, the prosumer is introduced as the ideal-typical citizen, highlighting the importance of the energy transition, the agency of material structures and a new emergent governmentality. 'Energy democracy' is conceptualized as an analytical and decision-making tool, defined along three dimensions: popular sovereignty, participatory governance and civic ownership, and operationalized with relevant indicators.
Research on deliberative democracy that contains a detailed discussion of its relationship to justice in Indigenous territory is limited. Through a case study of the controversy over a solar energy ...project on Kanaluvang tribal land in Taiwan, this article explores how issues of energy justice are constructed in multiple communication and deliberative sites of the governance system and the role of Indigenous activism and deliberation in addressing energy injustice. The research methods used are documentary analysis and in-depth interviews. The study presents a discursive narrative on the interconnected nature of the climate-energy-biodiversity nexus and how Indigenous activism creates deliberative spaces which reinforce Indigenous empowered space and oriented toward social learning and respect for tribal sovereignty. Indigenous activism and deliberation illuminate the emancipatory elements of Indigenous energy justice. It is crucial to connect multiple forms of tribal communication to the wider democratic system in the pursuit of energy justice.
Abstract
Statehood and sovereignty have been mutually implicating in the Westphalian international order. The spatially characteristic tenet of sovereignty has not been questioned, which collaterally ...fortifies the one-nation/one-state formula prescribed in modern sovereignty. However, fissures inhered in this nation-state formula are discernible, particularly when the conventional statist sovereignty has remained indefinite and inchoate. Taiwan's statist sovereignty has been overshadowed by its undetermined statehood and indefinite territorial domain. Intriguingly, once the rigidity of statist sovereignty is lifted, the development of national sovereignty becomes irrepressible. Reinvention of national sovereignty is informed by both universal values and case-specific particularity. For the former, individualism, multiculturalism, and self-determination serve exemplary cases. For the latter, the particularity is mostly presented in the wrestling between statist and national sovereignty. Taiwan's constitutional jurisprudence serves to verify the universal, as well as the particular development of Taiwan's national sovereignty. However, dangers loom large, in that identity reconfiguration has been cultivated collaterally, which brings about not only a sophisticated Taiwanese consciousness, but also a more uncertain outlook for cross-Strait relations.
The EU has been content to remain a marginal actor in the maritime sovereignty disputes in the East and South China Seas. It has adopted a diplomatic strategy that stresses the importance of ...upholding freedom of navigation and confidence building between the states party to the conflict. As argued here, this approach does not take account of the crucial interests Europe has at stake in the conflict. It is made even less tenable by China’s increasingly assertive behaviour towards securing its sovereignty in the region. Europe is at a crossroads: the EU may seek to overcome internal and external challenges to enhance its hard power capabilities, or it may continue to pursue a wholly soft power approach. Either way, how the EU deals with the current dispute will determine, in large part, its future role as a global security actor.
Amid U.S.-led efforts to "internationalize and multilateralize" support for Taiwan in response to mounting pressure from China, the 2021 U.S.-South Korea presidential statement's unprecedented ...reference to "peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait" made global headlines. This study analyzes contemporary Korea-Taiwan relations in historic and comparative perspective, focusing especially on Seoul's official 1992 position on "One China" and its implications for Korea's Taiwan policy. It demonstrates that Seoul has never recognized Beijing's self-defined "One China principle" concerning its essential claim of PRC sovereignty over Taiwan. Comparative analysis of Korea's position and subsequent policies with the U.S.', Japan's, and others' further reveals significant (potential) flexibility in Korea's approach to Taiwan. The relatively distant state of Korea-Taiwan relations today is the collective political choice of Korea's democratically-elected leaders-not the legacy of some (non-existent) putative commitment made to Beijing 30 years ago.
Colonisation, hauora and whenua in Aotearoa Moewaka Barnes, Helen; McCreanor, Tim
Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand,
11/2019, Letnik:
49, Številka:
sup1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Colonisation has deeply harmed Maori communities, seriously and consistently undermining their vitality, aspirations and potentials, particularly since the 1860s, at inestimable cost to the entire ...nation. The British arrival in Aotearoa commenced a relationship between two very different peoples that has profoundly influenced their distinct and collective fortunes ever since. Despite manifest breaches of te Tiriti o Waitangi, this relationship has centred settler interests ensuring that Maori sovereignty has been displaced in favour of colonial hegemony, entrenching longstanding, preventable inequities in health and other important domains of social life. In this paper we trace some broad indicators of relational health and wellbeing in Aotearoa and consider how Maori thinking about whenua, health and wellbeing might lead healing opportunities for people and whenua. We outline ways in which a unified, dynamic, relational Maori concept based on whenua as the determinant of health could contribute. We believe this could expand, strengthen and revitalise prevention, protection and promotion approaches, to counter the injustices of colonisation, contribute toward health equity and move toward just, sustainable shared futures for the benefit of all New Zealanders.
Diversified Farming Systems Kremen, Claire; Iles, Alastair; Bacon, Christopher
Ecology and society,
01/2012, Letnik:
17, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a ...more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination. We explore to what extent DFS overlap or are differentiated from existing concepts such as sustainable, multifunctional, organic or ecoagriculture. DFS are components of social-ecological systems that depend on certain combinations of traditional and contemporary knowledge, cultures, practices, and governance structures. Further, as ecosystem services are generated and regenerated within a DFS, the resulting social benefits in turn support the maintenance of the DFS, enhancing its ability to provision these services sustainably. We explore how social institutions, particularly alternative agri-food networks and agrarian movements, may serve to promote DFS approaches, but note that such networks and movements have other primary goals and are not always explicitly connected to the environmental and agroecological concerns embodied within the DFS concept. We examine global trends in agriculture to investigate to what extent industrialized forms of agriculture are replacing former DFS, assess the current and potential contributions of DFS to food security, food sovereignty and the global food supply, and determine where and under what circumstances DFS are expanding rather than contracting.
Confronting the coming five decades from our present conjuncture demands – to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra – both critical pessimism and a wilful politics of hope. In this article, we ...engage with the politics of climate breakdown and the responses to wider socio-ecological crises with a necessary critical pessimism. Specifically, we confront the capture of green transition imperatives by finance capital, as well as the troubling orientation of transition towards building new structures of accumulation around the vision of an electrified consumer society. We also see the coming decades being marked by the ever-increasing wealth of global asset-owning classes – who, by definition, enclose the atmospheric commons faster than any other community. Against this dystopian picture of increasingly concentrated wealth, corporate excess, and terrestrial crisis, we focus on the stubborn reproduction of socio-ecological life through various grounded projects across the world. We engage with communities who work against structural constraints to reproduce life from below through urban commoning, food sovereignty, Indigenous organising, and caretaking economies – all of which are scaling out their visions through alternative internationals. All of these projects, we argue, present a planetary and multiscalar political economy in practice, which connects grounded experience with resistance to the dynamics of capitalism at the state, corporate, and transnational levels. With lessons from these communities in mind, we call for a ‘planetary political economy of the global majority’, which prioritises the reproduction of socio-ecological life according to the visions of grounded anti-systemic projects.
Recent studies show that, when salience is high, 'heterogeneous lobbying coalitions' uniting business and civil society groups are more successful in achieving their lobbying objectives than ...homogeneous coalitions. It is therefore surprising that a coalition of tech firms and civil society activists failed to prevent the adoption of the EU's contested 2019 Copyright Directive, which constitutes a significant shift in the Union's approach to online content regulation. This article argues that proponents of the policy change successfully undermined the lobbying coalition by invoking notions of 'digital sovereignty' and by delegitimizing activists as Silicon Valley's 'useful idiots'. Combining process-tracing of the lobbying processes and content analysis of European Parliament debates, the article shows how legislators employed delegitimation and sovereignty claims to justify their non-responsiveness to public protests. The article contributes to the interest group literature and debates on 'digital sovereignty' by demonstrating its strategic use in the policy-making process.
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