Environmental governance in China: weakness and potential from an environmental policy integration perspective

Interest in China’s capacity for environmental governance is growing, in line with its environmental woes and exponential economic growth. Environmental policy efforts have lacked effectiveness, confirming the persistence of a disjuncture between promise and performance. This article contributes to the debate through the analytical lens of Environmental Policy Integration (EPI): a normative concept and governance regime indispensable to sustainable development. It finds that China,like most OECD countries, falls short of the concept. Despite encouraging recent changes, driven by the Hu-Wen regime, and encapsulated in the idea of scientific development, the analysis reveals weaknesses in all three EPI-type responses: normative, organisational and procedural. The disjuncture is confirmed, but drawing on EPI’s normative perspective, it is suggested that the reasons for this lie as much in the framing of the promise, as in the performance, or implementation, itself. Based on this interpretation and on China’s unique extreme characteristics, it is recommended that environmental policy objectives be given principled priority status, as a condition for effective governance.

Changing climate, changing decisions : understanding climate adaptation decision-making and the way science supports it

Tese de doutoramento, Ciências do Ambiente, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2015

Shopping malls and neoliberal trends in Southern European cities: Post-metropolitan challenges for urban planning policy

Whilst shopping malls have been explored at length by critical urban studies, there has been little exploration of their role in restructuring the practice of urban and spatial planning. This article uses the shopping mall as an object of study in the light of the neoliberal trends and post-metropolisation in Southern Europe, with the aim of exploring challenges for urban governance and planning practice and with a focus on the role of the ongoing economic crisis. A threefold exploratory framework – the ‘lost-in-time scenario’, the ‘messianic mall model’ and the ‘(im)mature planning explanation’ – is used to make sense of the local versions of shopping mall development in Lisbon (Portugal) and Palermo (Southern Italy). According to findings, we highlight the clash between the multi-scalar nature of shopping malls and the dominance of the municipal scale in regulatory planning frameworks, and the risk that shopping mall development (at least in Southern Europe) may replicate uneven development patterns, reproducing the pre-conditions of the crisis without helping to overcome it.