Microblogs are electronic platforms that convey brief communications posted by users. Keyword searches in popular microblogs, like Twitter, reveal fragments of users' knowledge of and views on issues like climate change. Evaluations of climate change communications in the microblogosphere are rare even compared with the few studies on the impacts of Web sites and blogs on users' perceptions of climate change. However, extant research focuses more often on appraising logic and evidence in microblog discourse than in discovering pathways of influence and impact. The limiting ‘frames’ imposed by strategic users of microblogs and the persuasive power of ‘influencers’ are often depicted as interfering with the open, egalitarian potential of microblogs, and also, as perpetrating bias and misinformation. But oversimplifying or biased framings and pronouncements by celebrities are the stock and trade of microblogs. Good or bad, they are part of a communication medium whose users plunge in to exchange views, to persuade, and to be persuaded. Tweets and posts on any number of issues are fodder for attitudinal analytics and predictive modelling. Tools of the analytical trade should be applied to climate change microblogging, too, considering the sheer number of people who post commentary on this topic, and considering the continuing need to better understand how people view and engage with climate change. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change

Environmental studies and environmental sciences programs in American and Canadian colleges and universities seek to ameliorate environmental problems through empirical enquiry and analytic judgment. In a companion article (Part 1) we describe the environmental program movement (EPM) and discuss factors that have hindered its performance. Here, we complete our analysis by proposing strategies for improvement. We recommend that environmental programs re-organize around three principles. First, adopt as an overriding goal the concept of human dignity-defined as freedom and social justice in healthy, sustainable environments. This clear higher-order goal captures the human and environmental aspirations of the EPM and would provide a more coherent direction for the efforts of diverse participants. Second, employ an explicit, genuinely interdisciplinary analytical framework that facilitates the use of multiple methods to investigate and address environmental and social problems in context. Third, develop educational programs and applied experiences that provide students with the technical knowledge, powers of observation, critical thinking skills and management acumen required for them to become effective professionals and leaders. Organizing around these three principles would build unity in the EPM while at the same time capitalizing on the strengths of the many disciplines and diverse local conditions involved.

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Forests in Vietnam are heavily utilized resources. Some 25 million people who live in and near forests depend on timber and non-timber resources for subsistence and income. Vietnam's timber processing industries, which are in a steep growth phase, demand raw material from the nation's forests, but that demand greatly outstrips available, high quality supply. A national forest development strategy through 2020 calls for broad expansion of plantation forests coupled with third-party forest certification. One type of forest certification, involving certification of groups of smallholder farmers, is comparatively understudied. A recent effort to promote group forest certification in Vietnam yielded measurable benefits to stakeholders, including enhanced income streams to plantation smallholders. However, long-term challenges to group forest certification remain, including smallholders' ability to cover recurring costs for certification -costs that are subsidized by a bilateral donor. Vietnam's recent experience with group forest certification represents an early chapter in that nation's ambitious plans to increase forest cover, make forests more productive through plantation forestry, and improve forest management and market access through forest certification.

The pathologies of the presidential appointment process are well documented and include appointees’ frequent lack of federal government work experience and their short appointment tenures. Less well understood are whether and to what extent these problems affect different subsets of high‐level appointees, such as administrators in the environmental bureaucracy. Top‐tier environmental appointees tend to stay longer in their appointed positions than do presidential appointees generally, and more than 40 percent have prior federal government management experience. These and other data suggest that key problems ascribed to the presidential appointment process are less salient in the case of high‐level environmental appointees. Appointees in Republican and Democratic administrations have comparable levels of academic training and federal government experience. These similarities notwithstanding, White House expectations for appointees’ political loyalty varies more from administration to administration. The Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (first term) administrations maintained the highest demands for political loyalty, with consequences for the policy–administration dichotomy in environmental agencies.

and other social media are increasingly touted as platforms not merely for networks of friends and for private diversion, but as vehicles that allow ordinary people to enter and influence the many arenas of public life. On the surface, the disparate and shapeless population of "i-reporters," policy "tweeters," and anonymous news web site "commentators" would appear to challenge the comparatively well-defined cast of professional diplomats, journalists, and propagandists that Harold D. Lasswell identified as policy-oriented communicators. However, to illuminate the roles and impacts of social media in politics and policymaking, insights from Lasswell's "science of communication" must be embedded in Lasswell's broader lessons on value assets and outcomes. A closer look at the so-called democratizing functions of social media in politics reveals the influence of powerful intermediaries who filter and shape electronic communications. Lasswell's insights on the likelihood of increased collaboration among political elites and skilled, "modernizing intellectuals" anticipates contemporary instances of state actors who recruit skilled creators and users of social media-collaborations that may or may not advance experiments in democracy. Lasswell's decision process concept is deployed to discover social media's strengths and weaknesses for the practicing policy scientist.

The environmental sciences/studies movement, with more than 1000 programs at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, is unified by a common interest-ameliorating environmental problems through empirical enquiry and analytic judgment. Unfortunately, environmental programs have struggled in their efforts to integrate knowledge across disciplines and educate students to become sound problem solvers and leaders. We examine the environmental program movement as a policy problem, looking at overall goals, mapping trends in relation to those goals, identifying the underlying factors contributing to trends, and projecting the future. We argue that despite its shared common interest, the environmental program movement is disparate and fragmented by goal ambiguity, positivistic disciplinary approaches, and poorly rationalized curricula, pedagogies, and educational philosophies. We discuss these challenges and the nature of the changes that are needed in order to overcome them. In a subsequent article (Part 2) we propose specific strategies for improvement.

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