Committing to Effective Climate Governance in Northern Ireland: A Defining Test of Devolution

This is the second of a two-part analysis exploring the interaction between UK devolution and governance of the national low carbon transition. It argues that devolution shaped the national climate governance regime created by the Climate Change Act 2008, but will itself be tested and even altered as the traction of the low carbon imperative intensifies. This dynamic is explored in the specific context of the UK’s most devolved region. The first article argued that devolution facilitated and arguably forced Northern Ireland’s devolved administration to give a highly qualified and potentially illusory consent to the regional application of the UK Act. The second article argues that making a more effective commitment to climate governance will be a defining test of its devolution arrangements but will require constitutional arrangements designed for conflict resolution to mature. Failure to do so will have important implications for the UK’s putative ‘national’ low carbon transition and the longer-term viability of devolution in the region.

A burning issue? Governance and anti-incinerator campaigns in Ireland, North and South

The decades of conflict in Northern Ireland created divisions between communities, with few opportunities for cooperation. However, in the 1990s opposition to a proposed cross-border incinerator brought the divided communities together. The 1990s economic boom in the Republic of Ireland generated a waste management crisis as the by-products of rampant consumerism overwhelmed the state's rudimentary waste disposal system. Three Irish anti-incinerator campaigns which have pitted local communities against the Irish state or the Northern Ireland Department of the Environment are examined. Community attempts to gain leverage within the political governance frameworks in operation on both sides of the border are examined and the various ways in which environmental movements respond to the crisis of waste management under different governance regimes are illuminated.

Cities and The Spirit Level: Reasserting the Public Interest in Planning Governance

Urban planning in Europe has its roots in social reform movements for reform of the 18th and 19th centuries and in the UK evolved into the state-backed comprehensive planning system established as a pillar of the welfare state in 1947. This new planning system played a key role in meeting key social needs of the early post-war period, through, for example, an ambitious new town programme. However, from the late 1970s onwards the main priorities of the planning system have shifted as the UK state has withdrawn support for welfare and reasserted market values. One consequence of this has been an increased inequality in access to many of the resources that planning seeks to regulate, including affordable housing, local services and environmental quality.
Drawing on evidence from recent literature on equality, including Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level this paper will question the role of planning in an era of post-politics and a neo-liberal state. It will review some of the consequences for the governance and practice of planning and question what this means for the core values of the planning profession. Finally, the paper will discuss the rise of the Healthy Urban Planning Movement in the US and Europe and ask whether this provides any potential for reasserting the public interest in planning process.

Rescaling the Governance of Renewable Energy: Lessons from the UK Devolution Experience

Efforts to rescale governance arrangements to foster sustainable development are rarely simple in their consequences, an out-turn examined in this paper through an analysis of how the governance of renewable energy in the UK has been impacted by the devolution of power to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Theoretically, attention is given to the ways in which multiple modes of governing renewable energy, and the interactions between modes and objects of governance, together configure the scalar organization of renewable energy governance. Our findings show how the devolved governments have created new, sub-national renewable energy strategies and targets, yet their effectiveness largely depends on UK-wide systems of subsidy. Moreover, shared support for particular objects of governance—large-scale, commercial electricity generation facilities—has driven all the devolved government to centralize and expedite the issuing of consents. This leads to a wider conclusion. While the level at which environmental problems are addressed can affect how they are governed, what key actors believe about the objects of governance can mediate the effects of any rescaling processes.

Attaining Subsidiarity-Based Multilevel Governance of Genetically Modified Cultivation?

The cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops in the EU is highly harmonised, but with persisting conflicts over authority. The Commission responded to internal and external pressures with a more flexible approach to coexistence, a proposed opt-out clause and a promise to review the existing EU GM regime, providing an opportunity to consider and suggest paths of development. This article considers the post-authorisation policy-making powers of Member States and subnational regions, in light of subsidiarity-based multilevel governance. It considers the different approaches to risk-centred issues and more general policy choices. Overall, the developments occurring at the EU level are strengthening subsidiarity-based multilevel governance within the GM cultivation regime, but with significant opportunities to improve it further through focussing on the complementary powers, coordination and the regional levels in particular.