CATRINUS J. JEPMA This volume contains the various contributions that were made during the International Conference on Joint Implementation, held near Groningen, The Netherlands, 1-3 June 1994. The conference was initiated by The Netherlands' Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment -along with the Ministries of Foreign (Development Cooper ation) and Economic Affairs -and carried out under the responsibility of Foundation IDE (Groningen, The Netherlands). Its underlying idea was to bring together an international group of specialists on Joint Implementation (11) - from...

More than 200 major river basins are shared by two or more countries and, together, these basins account for about 60% of the earth's land area, constituting a significant portion of the world's fresh water resources. They are thus both a significant asset to the nations sharing them, as well as a potential source of conflict. This book presents a generic framework for the analysis of decision making on international river issues. It emphasises the strategic character of the interactions between the basin states and addresses learning and institutionalization processes, taking account of the...

Nowadays, the environment looms large in the analysis of conflict in developing societies, and the precise role it plays is the subject of an ongoing debate. The de bate has moved on from the earlier, but still popular, notions of 'power struggles', 'class struggles' and 'ethnic conflicts', to a perception of conflict as the product of intense group competition for resources. Where the state controls the distribu tion of resources, itself inevitably becomes party to conflicts whose bone of con tention is access to state power as the most efficient means of gaining access to resources. The...

Most publications on heavy metals and the environment have focused on environmental pathways and risks. The present book establishes a link between the environmental risks of heavy metals and the societal causes of the risks. Economic models, substance flow models and environmental fate and risk assessment models have been integrated into a single analytical framework that has been used to trace and understand the routes by which four heavy metals enter the economy, through to their final destination in the environment. The long-term impacts of the current metals management regime in the...

Recent years have witnessed a substantial change in both the organisation and substance of environmental policy, both national and international. Western societies have seen a change in the relationships between the state, the market, and civil society, leading to new conceptions of governance, a process here called political modernisation that gives rise to the institutionalisation of new policy arrangements. An environmental policy arrangement refers to the organisation and substance of a policy domain in terms of policy coalitions, policy discourses, rules of the game, and resources. The...

The book focuses on the negotiation process leading up to the creation of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and the domestic implementation of this international agreement. This political science study of the negotiation process applies several perspectives drawn from international relations theories, while also focusing on the implementation of international environmental agreements in a developing country. Moreover, the links between factors at international and domestic levels are examined, with four proposed mechanisms through which an international institution may affect domestic...

Sustainable development has been the basic goal of the European Union since the Treaty of Amsterdam. After an in-depth analysis of the concept, the book goes on to translate the concept into practicable and tangible opportunities for urban and regional sustainable development. Extensive lists of criteria and indicators have been developed for additional explanation and support. An entirely new and innovative system for sustainability planning is presented, based on the interdependence of the cities and their hinterlands' and on the conviction that the development of one or more key sectors...

The issue of climate change is now widely recognised as one of the major challenges for mankind in the 21st century, not only because it may ultimately affect many areas of our environment, nature and human activity but also because its mitigation may have far reaching consequences for almost all sectors of the economy where energy conversion takes place. Although climate change is firmly positioned on the political agenda and some initial targets have been agreed within a global framework, we are still far away from a mature political and practical policy which may deliver timely and...

When did man discover nuclear waste? To answer this question, we first have to ask if nuclear waste really is something that could be called a scientific discovery, such as might deserve a Nobel Prize in physics. In early writings within nuclear energy research radioactive waste appears to be a neglected issue, a story never told. Nuclear waste first seems to appear when a public debate arose about public health risks of nuclear power in the late 1960s and early 70s. In nuclear physics, consensus was established at an early stage about the understanding of the splitting of uranium nuclei. The...

where Jeremy Richardson, Albert Weale and Hugh Ward were excellent hosts at the Department of Government and Thomas Christiansen a very good roommate. Having included the UK as a country where decision processes were far less participatory (and thus worse in my own view) than those in the Netherlands, I started doing my first interviews there, which were mainly intended to identify suitable case studies for research. But then I read a highly critical review of a book that had a similar topic as my study. The critique was that cases of hazardous waste siting cannot adequately be studied...