Climate scientists and policy analysts alike have repeatedly called for urgent mitigating action to avoid the most adverse effects of climate change. However, within the political arena this action is largely lacking. In order to understand this discrepancy, we consider the institutions in climate change policy to be of central importance. Renewed interest in institutions has been generated to a great extent by 'new institutionalism', a field of research combining economics, political science and sociology, and which has become increasingly popular since the 1980s. The tendency of institutions to resist change and thereby stabilising policy can be understood by using the concept of institutional inertia. Our review of the new institutionalist literature on climate change identifies five main mechanisms that generate institutional inertia: costs, uncertainty, path dependence, power and legitimacy. Means of addressing these mechanisms are proposed by referring to the work on institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work. A focus on the mechanisms that generate and regenerate institutional inertia is beneficial for future research on institutions and climate change, as it can be used to study bottlenecks for action and address more clearly the urgency of necessary policy interventions.
Projects are often praised for their efficiency, responsiveness to local context, and capacity to spur innovation, especially in comparison to more permanent organizations. Projects-cross-cutting organizational forms chartered to advance well-defined objectives during a specified period of time-have been a staple organizational form in the private sector, but only recently have scholars started to evaluate their relevance to governance within developed economies. In this paper we explore projectification-i.e., expanded reliance on temporally-bounded organizations-as a conceptual frame to advance understanding of environmental governance and as an empirical vehicle to incorporate temporal scales into a literature that has largely been focused on questions of spatial scale and levels of social organization. Through a case study of the United States Department of Agriculture's recently created Regional Conservation Partnership Program, we critically assess the concept of projectification. Based on interviews with key policy analysts and administrators and a review of policy documents, we critically evaluate prospects for project forms to empower local actors, produce new knowledge, and disrupt the policy field.
ABSTRACT. The concept of temporal fit between biophysical systems and institutions has lately received great attention by scholars interested in environmental governance. Although we agree that the concept of temporal fit is a valuable approach for highlighting the temporal challenges of governance systems, we argue that the concept is currently lacking precision with regard to temporal complexity. We build on Barbara Adam's work on "timescapes" to offer a more nuanced account of temporal fit and misfit. We illustrate the analytical usefulness of our approach by examining the regulation of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) within European Union's Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), a case with amplified temporal challenges. We suggest that, when addressing temporal fit, two points require greater attention. First, similar to time, temporal misfits are complex. In REACH the temporal misfit is linked to four temporal features, time frame, sequence, tempo, and timing, contributing to the insufficiency of EDC regulation. Second, the temporal features are interlinked and feed back into each other, which strengthens the temporal misfit further. In conclusion, we propose that environmental impact assessment could be used as a tool to circumvent the regulatory paralysis of EDC regulation in Europe.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.