Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter shows why making progress towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 12, ‘ensuring sustainable consumption and production (SCP)’, requires a systems perspective and transformative change. Current trends are, unfortunately, inconsistent with the goals and, with respect to a number of indicators, will require sharp reversal if global sustainability is a determined objective. The chapter argues that current conditions are the result of an ineffectual policy mix, such as a reliance on efficiency improvements without the imposition of caps on absolute energy and material throughput, a reluctance to accept that certain goals are incompatible (increased resource flows and reduced ecological footprints) and inadequate understanding of the workings of complex systems (a perspective that assesses interactions between components when designing policy interventions). More realistic and purposeful progress towards achieving the intentions of SDG 12 will require consideration of these issues as well as a recognition of the social dimensions of sustainability, a focus on qualitative development over quantitative increase of gross domestic product and a reorientation of priorities that emphasizes well-being through various policy innovations.
The world is facing severe levels of food insecurity and environmental degradation related to agri-food practices. Against this backdrop and building on norm research in international relations, this chapter traces the historical phases of norm development in global agri-food governance since the Second World War. The chapter outlines that food security has been at the core of a norm cluster, in addition to improved nutrition and sustainable agriculture. As a core norm, food security perpetuates approaches that are primarily designed to increase agri-food production and technological innovations and that do not inherently consider ecosystem maintenance. In this line, although SDG 2 (Zero hunger) formally integrates different agri-food norms, the dominance of food security continues to hinder environmentally salient governance approaches. Alternative policy actors, such as organic and food sovereignty movements, have not yet succeeded in their promotion of sustainable agriculture.
This chapter discusses how cross-sectoral, transboundary and multilevel challenges related to governing water resources are tackled by global water policies and subnational governance arrangements, with a specific focus on the implementation of Agenda 2030. Drawing from the literature on environmental governance and the development of global policies for water management in the last three decades, the chapter presents reflections on the role of subnational governments in the implementation of Agenda 2030 and the specific interactions between Sustainable Development Goals 6 and 13. Three cases illustrate how subnational governance arrangements are dealing with the three challenges. The countries under study, Bolivia, Ecuador and Switzerland, share challenges associated with mountainous regions while covering a gradient of economic development and political institutions. The chapter ends with reflections on relevant questions for future research based on the three challenges and the governance of water and climate interactions.
Comparing the chapters’ answers to the key questions, this synthesis chapter aims to bring together the many open ends in environmental governance research. There is a prevailing, but controversial, perception of the environment as a global commodity. As a result of the prevalence of this perception, socio-economic development continues to be prioritized often at the expense of ecosystem protection. With regard to actors and institutions, while the development of centralized environmental governance has failed, a polycentric world order has emerged including networks of environmental pioneers. On the one hand, scholars agree that the fragmented international landscape constitutes a challenge for coherent action and coordinated cooperation in addressing environmental issues. On the other hand, as reform is needed in response to the multiple crises of our time, there is also a chance for bottom-up initiatives to succeed. There is a broad variety of commitment by subnational units such as city networks. Great hope also lies in partnerships with business actors and civil society initiatives.
This chapter focuses on the multiple facets and meanings of water and how it is a contested resource. It also explores linkages between SDG 6 (Clean water and sanitation) and SDG 2 (Zero hunger). Water is essential for all life and integral to the functioning of food systems; similarly, changes in our food systems are essential to achieve SDG 6. And improvements in both are needed to reduce inequities in resources and achievements. As an example, land, food and water rights often go hand in hand, and are marked by gender, caste, racial and other exclusions. The chapter highlights how accessing water for food security can be challenging for smallholders and for vulnerable and marginalized women and men, and how water allocation systems, privatization and reform processes can affect local people’s rights to water, land and food. It argues for the need to improve policy coherence across water, land and food, and concludes by making a case for strengthening the relationship between the human right to water and food, especially for marginalized women and men.
This chapter evaluates SDG 5 on gender equality from an ecofeminist perspective. Ecofeminism is a critical approach to political economy that problematizes the contradictions evident in mainstream sustainable development that arise from attempting to protect the environment and further equality while also pursuing economic growth. After explaining the core themes of this theoretical perspective, its analysis is organized around two broad clusters of criticisms concerned with the reductionist view of gender in SDG 5 and the production/reproduction dualism that underpins the green economic vision apparent in Agenda 2030 more broadly. The chapter shows how an onus on empowering women without paying due attention to the care work they perform in their households and communities abstracts from the everyday activities of women in the informal economy and reifies unequal divisions of labour. In response, it is suggested that the road to achieving gender-just sustainability must be paved, not with liberal concepts of equality and empowerment within a pro-growth economy, but with ambitious political goals and concrete policies for a fundamental transformation in the relations and responsibilities of socio-ecological reproduction to redress the structural dimensions of gendered and racialized injustice.
This chapter details canonical perspectives from the progenitors of the Capabilities Approach (CA). The CA approaches the concept of justice through the lens of well-being, a conceptual shift developed in opposition to the mainstream distributive theories of justice as inequality. The chapter highlights how CA theorists identify procedures for measuring inequality and human well-being, in addition to how metrics for identifying social and environmental inequalities can be determined and addressed. The chapter also addresses this approach’s primary critiques, which stress the CA’s tendencies towards individualism and its difficulty in incorporating more structural inequalities inherent to capitalist modernity. The authors end by suggesting that, while the CA is not a theory of justice in itself, its methodological flexibility positions it well to analyse situated inequalities within social, political and environmental research.
This chapter examines some of the more peculiar elements of a climate justice perspective, noting what differientiates it from an environmental justice one. It assesses the impact of interrelated structures of social, economic, and political inequality on experiences of a warming world, the growing disparities between its communities, as well as various efforts to overcome them.
In the concluding chapter, we illustrate connections between the different parts of the volume to identify potential areas for deepened engagement among justice theories. The chapter begins by discussing the role of liberalism as a touchstone for theories of justice and the limitations and opportunities this presents for justice theorising. The chapter then explores the connection between more theoretical approaches with those examining actually-existing circumstances of injustice. In doing so, we return to the forms, aspects and realms of justice to highlight how these feature throughout the chapter surveys, to analyse convergences and divergences among the approaches. In ending, the chapter offers a set of tables to help visualise and categorise the different traditions to provide readers a pedagogical resource useful for drawing connections and indicating avenues for future research.
