Energy and Resources Group

This paper explores the issue of sustainability at the macro scale employing multi-criteria decision aid (MCDA) methods. This paper explores the issue of sustainability at the macro scale employing multi-criteria decision aid (MCDA) methods. The incommensurability of values and the essentially multi-dimensional and dynamic nature of sustainability challenge the use of composite measurement indices. This determined the choice of MCDA methods. Austria was chosen as a case study, due to the wide availability of data, especially on indicators of strong sustainability. The structure of the multi-criteria problem comprised the evolution of different sustainability dimensions over time. The process for selecting criteria included a critical assessment of institutional sustainability agendas (UN, EU and Austrian Government) and theoretical recommendations. After an assessment of MCDA methods, the NAIADE method demonstrated the most suitable properties for sustainability assessment. The application of this outranking approach was undertaken in two separate settings: long-term from 1960 to 2003 and medium-term, 1995-2003 with varying numbers of criteria. The response of results to the addition of evaluating criteria and periods was tested. The degree of credibility for accepting preference relations was also employed for sensitivity analysis. According to the results of the long-term assessment, especially in the weak sustainability setting, sustainable progress is taking place in Austria. In the medium term, in the stronger sustainability setting and, especially as the number of criteria increases, more incomparable periods appear and trends are less determined. Moreover, it is shown how results crucially depend on the methodological choices. This is one of the first applications of the multi-criteria tools to the dynamic analysis of sustainability at the macro scale.

Human agency plays a key role in the processes of biological invasions. This comprises not only the human role in the configuration of driving forces or in the perception of the impacts, but also the conceptualization of alien species themselves as an environmental problem. This paper examines different stakeholders’ positions in bioinvasion processes at different scales, and it looks at their relevance for the management of invasive species. It compares two cases: the invasion process of Dreissena polymorpha in the Ebro River in Spain and the case of Hydrilla verticillata in Lake Izabal, Guatemala. Our results are structured according to impacts and to management options. The discussion focuses on the relevance of incorporating the different stakeholders’ interests and values in the analysis and management of biological invasions. Although social analysis of stakeholders’ positions is necessary in order to foster management actions, it also reveals conflicts on the relevant criteria and on the very definition of invasive species.

Although there is a strong controversy regarding the introduction and commercialisation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Europe, GM maize has been sown in Spain since 1998. Stakeholders' positions on the role that GMOs play in trends of the state of agriculture and environment in Catalonia are analysed. The application of the Driving forces –Pressures – State – Impact – Responses (DPSIR) framework in this case study highlights its potential for organising and structuring information. However, the model can be ambiguous when used as an analytical tool in value-laden complex situations. Thus, GM agriculture is sometimes seen as a pressure on the agro-environment and sometimes as a modernising response to an economic and environmental crisis. A redefinition of the DPSIR categories is proposed, aiming to reflect on these situations by better acknowledging different legitimate perspectives and narratives. This is done, on the one hand, by allowing alternative descriptions of causal chains and, on the other hand, by taking into consideration social and political aspects besides the relationship between economics and environmental spheres.

The study described in this article incorporates stakeholders’ views on aquatic invasion processes and combines expert analysis with information from field work into an evaluation exercise. Management scenarios are designed based on available technical data and stakeholders’ perceptions. These scenarios are evaluated using the Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation framework employing the NAIADE model. Two evaluations are carried out, technical and social. Social acceptance of different management scenarios, distribution of costs and benefits, and attribution of responsibility are discussed.The case study was carried out on Lake Izabal, a body of water connected to the Caribbean Sea in Northeastern Guatemala. In 2000, local fishermen reported the presence of an alien species in the lake, the macrophyte Hydrilla verticillata. Two years later, this alien species was established around the entire lakeshore, damaging the ecosystem, endangering native species and the subsistence of local inhabitants through impacts on transportation, fishing practices, and tourism.

Collaboration to deploy economic evaluation tools is a recent form of interaction between academia and social movements as a means to pursue more sustainable futures. Specifically, academics and environmental justice organisations (EJOs) conduct monetary valuations, cost-benefit analyses (CBAs) and multi-criteria analyses (MCA), in order to explore and reveal the un-sustainability of environmentally controversial projects. The effectiveness of such evaluation tools for pursuing environmental justice is still a matter of debate.
In this document, we report on the EJOLT project experience of developing evaluation processes between EJOs and academics in the context of specific environmental justice struggles. This resulted in a mutual-learning process that explored the conditions under which CBA, MCA, and economic valuation tools can be either enabling or disabling for EJOs in their struggles for environmental justice.
The outcomes suggest that methods are more effectively used through carefully planned interventions supporting debates on local futures and visions, and when there are complementarities with regulatory and institutional developments. Oppositely, evaluation methods disable local mobilization when they force communities to bring their concerns into assessment schemes that do not fit their own languages and concerns, when they reproduce uneven power relations, or where public decisions have little to do with formulating and advancing 'reasoned arguments'. Insights on the benefits from science-activism collaboration and recommendations on the use of evaluation tools are finally outlined.

Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 21, 2014 20
Abstract
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice.

Keywords: Political ecology, environmental justice organizations, environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, activist knowledge

Joan Martinez-Alier a 1
Isabelle Anguelovski a
Patrick Bond b
Daniela Del Bene a
Federico Demaria a
Julien-Francois Gerber c
Lucie Greyl d
Willi Haas e
Hali Healy a
Victoria Marín-Burgos f
Godwin Ojo g
Marcelo Porto h
Leida Rijnhout i
Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos a
Joachim Spangenberg j
Leah Temper a
Rikard Warlenius k
Ivonne Yánez l

The ecological debt concept emerged in the early 1990s from within social movements driven by rising environmental awareness, emerging consciousness of Western responsibility for past colonial subjugations, and a general sense of injustice during the third world debt crisis. First developed organically, mainly in
locally-scaled, civil contexts, ecological debt has since gained attention in academia and international environmental negotiations.

The concept of ecological debt requires further elucidation and
elaboration, especially in light of its historical interconnection with environmental justice. In this paper, the development of the concept of ecological debt in both activist and academic circles is described, theoretical building blocks for its operationalisation
are discussed and three brief cases illustrating its recent utilisation are presented.

Drawing on these building blocks, the concept of ecological debt has been used as a biophysical measure, a legal instrument and a distributional principle. In theory and in practice, it has much to offer to the global environmental justice movement. We conclude by reflecting on some of the pros and cons of the ecological debt concept as a tool to be used in fulfilling some of the goals of environmental justice movements in the world today.

This report sets out to provide evidence-based support for successful environmental justice (EJ) activism and assess the constituents and outcomes of contemporary socio-environmental mining conflicts by applying a collaborative statistical approach to the political ecology of mining resistances. The empirical evidence covers 346 mining cases from around the world, featured on the EJOLT website as The EJOLT Atlas of Environmental Justice, and is enriched by an interactive discussion of results with activists and experts. In an effort to understand both the general patterns identified in conflicts at hand, and the factors that determine EJ ‘success’ and ‘failure’ from an activist viewpoint, the experiences of EJOs that pursue EJ in mining conflicts are analysed by combining qualitative and quantitative methods.

The report employs, first, social network analysis to study the nature of the relationships both among corporations involved in the mining activity, on the one hand, and among EJOs resisting against the mining project, on the other. Both sets of conditions and cooperation are then compared to discuss ways to develop a more resilient activist network that can trigger social change and achieve EJ success. Then, multivariate analysis methods are used to examine the defining factors in achieving EJ success and to answer the following research questions: In which case a conflict is more intense? What makes EJ served? When is a disruptive project stopped? Finally, qualitative analysis, based on descriptive statistics, is conducted to investigate factors that configure the perception of success for EJ and incorporate activist knowledge into the theory of EJ. A thorough analysis of the answers given to question “Do you consider the case as an accomplishment for the EJ?” with their respective justifications help us to understand why the resistance movements consider a particular result as an EJ success or failure in the context of a mining conflict.

Overall, such analytical exercises, coproduced with activists, should be seen as a source of engaged knowledge creation, which is increasingly being recognised as a pertinent method to inform scientific debate with policy implications. We hope that the findings of this report, which brings past experiences on mining conflicts together, will be insightful and relevant for EJOs. The results and policy recommendations are open to further testing, whenever a better evidence base becomes available.

Claims for a global agenda addressing the need to protect environmental flows are increasing. In the context of frequent conflicts related to unsustainable exploitation of rivers, instream flow policies may result in very different outcomes and involve different beneficiaries.We propose and test an innovative local knowledge-based methodology that uses the ecosystem services approach to disentangle the links within the river-society system. In particular, network analysis is employed to identify potential tradeoffs caused by the river flow management. Our empirical evidence relies on a thorough scrutiny of key stakeholders’ positions in the Ter River basin (Catalonia, Spain). As in other Northern Mediterranean contexts, multiple weirs interrupt the water flow in the upper course, diverting water for hydropower. Meanwhile, in the middle course, the bulk of water flow is transferred to the metropolitan Barcelona contributing to water scarcity in the Lower Ter, where farmers and other users claim against imposed restrictions on access to water flows.
Our results point out that (1) in contexts such as the analyzed
one, the ‘ecosystem services’ (ES) notion enhances communication among stakeholders; (2) ground-up exercises are essential for identifying river benefits at local scale and characterizing the related ES; and (3) network analysis helps to make explicit tradeoffs between river uses, in which recognition is crucial to understand how conflicts on river flows emerge and how can be managed, (4) management of instream flows should be informed by the complex interaction, herein outlined, between hydrological alterations, components of river ecosystems and the benefits they provide.

This article reviews methodologies, types, and political implications of water conflicts from a political ecology perspective. The political ecology of water studies the conflicts on water use, whether as an input or as a vehicle for waste disposal. Both the quantity and the quality of water are relevant for conflicts on water as a commodity and also indirectly in conflicts on water from oil and gas extraction, mining, or biomass production. This study provides an overview and classification of water conflicts, showing how social movements born from such conflicts are creatively generating new modalities of water management and governance in the process. To this end, this article first examines methodological approaches for the analysis of water conflicts and water justice. Then, a taxonomy of water conflicts based on the stages of the commodity chain is presented and discussed. Afterward, empirical evidence is collected showing how social mobilizations in water conflicts become effective providers of management alternatives and governance modalities. Water justice movements and organizations have formed networks, have proposed new principles of water management, and have not only been active in the promotion of the human right towater but also in the recognition of water, along with other elements of nature, as a subject of rights.

Este artículo enfatiza la alternativa que suponen los sistemas de garantía participativa (SGP), no sólo para superar algunas limitaciones de los sistemas CTP, sino también para fortalecer de manera sinérgica a movimientos sociales, apuntalando además las bases de una soberanía alimentaria local y regional. Se aborda el caso de la asociación CampiAperti y la campaña Genuino Clandestino en Italia.

Contribution to the "Atlas der Globalisierung"
http://monde-diplomatique.de/product_info.php?products_id=243947
Im neuen Atlas der Globalisierung geht es um das wichtigste globale Zukunftsthema überhaupt: Postwachstum. Was Wachstum ist, weiß jeder - ohne Wachstum gibt es angeblich keinen Wohlstand, keine Freiheit, keinen Erfolg. Doch auf einem begrenzten Planeten kann es kein unbegrenztes Wachstum geben. Wir ahnen schon lange, dass es so nicht weitergehen kann. Aber was dann? Der Postwachstumsatlas gibt Antworten.

Rivers in developed regions are under significant stress due to nutrient enrichment generated mainly by human activities. Excess nitrogen and phosphorus emissions are the product of complex dynamic systems influenced by various factors such as demographic, socio-economic and technological development. Using a Catalan river catchment, La Tordera (North-East of Spain), as a case study of an integrated and interdisciplinary environmental assessment of nutrient flows, we present and discuss the development of narrative socio-economic scenarios through a participatory process for the sustainable management of the anthropogenic sources of nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus.
In this context, scenarios are an appropriate tool to assist nutrient emissions modelling, and to assess impacts, possible
pathways for socio-economic development and associated uncertainties. Evaluated against the 1993–2003 baseline period, scenarios target the 2030 horizon, i.e. through the implementation process of the Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/EC). After a critical examination of the methodology used in the participatory development of socio-economic scenarios, we present four possible futures (or perspectives) for the Catalan river catchment conceived by stakeholders invited to a workshop. Keys to the success of such a participatory process were trust, which enhanced openness, and disagreements, which fostered the group’s creativity for scenario development. The translation of narrative socio-economic scenarios into meaningful nutrient emission scenarios is also discussed. By integrating findings of natural sciences and socio-economic analysis, we aim to assist decision makers and stakeholders in evaluating optimal management strategies for the anthropogenic sources of nitrogen and phosphorus.