The city of Milan, one of the most car-dependent and polluted in Europe, is also among the few to have introduced a road pricing measure. The story of how this happened is of great interest, for it shows how EU regulations, scientific evidence and political action at the local level have concurred to bring about change in the city’s transport policy. Unlike the well-known cases of London and Stockholm, it is concerns for the levels of pollution (rather than congestion) that have led to the introduction of the “Ecopass” scheme in 2008. Accordingly, in the following years the public debate has focused on the effectiveness of this pollution charge in reducing PM10 – a pollutant with adverse health impacts. Based on the analysis of media coverage and official reports, this paper argues that EU regulations had a crucial role in determining the newsworthiness of PM10 in Milan. Media and public concerns have then put increasing pressure on politicians to find a solution to the “emergency”. The dubious effectiveness of Ecopass in reducing PM10 levels then has had two kinds of consequences. First, the scheme was upgraded to a congestion charge in 2012, following the results of a bottom-up referendum in which a large majority of voters demanded both an upgrade and an extension of the Ecopass area: this stands in stark contrast with the experience of other cities, where voters have turned down charging schemes (e.g. Edinburgh, Manchester). Second, the new city administration has recently implemented a monitoring system for Black Carbon, a new PM metric that is more suitable to prove the effectiveness of traffic restrictions. Overall, the paper shows how all actors involved in the process (politicians, media and civil society groups) made strategic use of scientific evidence on pollution, in order to bring forward their own agendas.

One of the most heatedly debated aspects of EU’s policy on biofuels in recent times concern indirect land use change (ILUC) induced by the production of biofuels. However, when the EU Renewable Energies Directive (RED) adopted in 2008, regulating ILUC was not considered for the time being. Ever since, the fundamental conflicts on biofuels regarding their social and ecological effects crystallize in the debates on ILUC, which is underpinned by the wide range of results of scientific research on the topic. Starting from explaining the concept of ILUC and from conceptual considerations regarding new ways of knowledge production and its use in the policy process, we firstly trace the policy process on biofuels’ ILUC with a special focus on the actors and their stances in this context. Subsequently, mainly by document analysis, we give a detailed overview of the research on biofuels’ ILUC, focusing on which actors are related to the various ILUC studies and on what the relationship between these actors and the studies’ orientations (methodologies, etc.) and outcomes is. The analysis shows how the increase in ILUC research and its characteristics can be related to the societal problems arising from biofuels production, to the actors involved in it, and to their stakes in the issue. This points to the social embeddedness of ILUC research into societal as well as political practices and therefore – at least partly – qualifies it as a new mode of knowledge production. Furthermore, it points to special role scientific evidence plays regarding the policy process on the regulation of ILUC in the EU. In this respect, our observations suggest that, on the one hand, the scientific evidence on biofuels’ ILUC as well as the uncertainty and complexity has been well perceived and taken up in the policy process. On the other hand, however, its role has eventually been reduced to an instrumental one, serving to legitimize and rationalize decisions agreed upon elsewhere beforehand.

The SAVE framework promotes an integrated and iterative approach to inclusive decision making for Sustainable Development, involving three inter-related components; Assessment, Visualisation and Enhancement. The assessment and enhancement components are highly interrelated and must commence together at the visioning stages of projects. This enhancement component requires the development of a full understanding of the ways in which decisions are made on a project in order that the information needs of stakeholder are understood. The enhancement component then ensures that due consideration is given by decision makers to potential impacts on the direction of the assessment indicators at key decisions points throughout the project development stages. At the heart of the framework is a simulation and visualisation tool that has been developed to enable all stakeholders, regardless of background or experience, to understand, interact with and influence decisions made on the sustainability of urban and rural design. This tool takes the unique approach of combining 3D interactive and immersive technologies with computer modelling to present stakeholders with an interactive virtual development. This paper describes a number of case studies where the SAVE Framework has already been applied and outlines its further development and future application.

In the current context of economic and environmental crisis and the related complexity and uncertainties, what deciders seem to expect are i.a. robust factual evidence about the effectiveness of their policies. This call for evidence finds an answer through Impact Assessment (IA): Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), etc.; and more lately sustainable or integrated IA. The European Commission Impact Assessment (EC-IA) procedure is said to be one of the most institutionalised and successful of the new IA’s generation. This internal ex-ante integrated evaluation applies on almost all Commission initiatives and is meant to address “all” significant economic, social and environmental impacts of these proposals. If IA’s have widely been studied as evidence-based tools aiming at rationalizing decision-making contributing to the ‘Better Regulation’ objectives, some authors have highlighted their limits as decision-support tools feeding ‘directly’ scientific knowledge into the decisions, while stressing the political effects (intended or not) of these meta-instruments. Following such an effort to step back from a linear approach of decision-making, we question the political effects of the EC-IA through a cognitive approach (Muller, 2005; Radaelli and Schmidt, 2004) wondering whether EC-IA, as meta-instrument, contributes to diffuse a specific conception of “the environment” within European policy- making? Indeed, the evidence-gathering process framed through EC-IA requirements might have an impact on policy-making through this very process of “definition” of what are significant environmental impacts, not least because of the required quantification of the analysed impacts (as called for in the EC-IA guidelines). Within the scope of this paper, we will present the results of the literature review feeding into the on-going elaboration of our theoretical and methodological framework.

A popular current topic for urban as well as for transport planning is e-mobility. In the foreseeable future, the electro vehicle will be used mainly for short distances, making it particularly interesting for urban mobility. Therefore, emobility seems to be the future path for a sustainable urban and transport development. The contribution challenges this assumption by presenting the results of a recent research project in Berlin. Within this project, the decisionmaking process of establishing the charging infrastructure was analysed. By combining a discourse analysis and a policy study, the proponents for e-mobility, as well as their intentions can be shown. The contribution will further show that particular interests promoting e-mobility do not necessarily coincide with a comprehensive planning strategy presenting a concept leading to sustainable urban and transport development.

One of the environmental challenges is the effect on water availability and water-related diseases accounts for 80 percent of sicknesses in developing countries. Despite this, there has remained increasing research on poverty reduction, with little emphasis on water access particularly in Africa. Using micro-level data from survey conducted by the World Bank and National Bureau of Statistics, covering over 5,000 households and 27,000 household members across the 36 States of Nigeria, the study formulates an econometric model. The results from logistic regression analysis show that the main determinants of households access to water include: age of the household members, the marital status, the sector where the household member works, the type of employment, the number of working hours, access to informal means of financial credit and the income level of the household, among others. Some recommendations on how to boost water access of households are made in the study.

This study proposes a conceptual model applied to water resources management for assessing environmental management policies according to sustainable development principles. The main premise is that public policies have a natural cycle of design, regulation, implementation and evaluation, to achieve their institutional objectives. Institutions involved in politics are conditioned by the cultural environment, so that institutional performance is influenced by subjects and standards behaviors, physical parameters, and in turn, can orient institutional change. These elements define the criteria for efficiency assessment under a measure of sustainable development and in accordance to Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) methodology. Based on literature, documents, case study and by applying the deductive method, Brazilian National Water Resources Policy (1997) is analyzed, especially for groundwater industrial user’s rights in the lower course of Paraiba River Basin, Paraiba, Brazil, located on a semi-arid region. Through the establishment of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the generated model was calibrated at institutional and environmental levels with data from the case study. The generated metadata w ere used to compose the indicators that feed the model. This model allow s a perspective of IWRM application, providing objective results on the efficiency feasibility assessment of environmental and water management public policies.

A weighting scheme is proposed to construct a new index of environmental quality for different countries using an approach that relies on consistent tests for stochastic dominance (SD) efficiency. The test statistics and the estimators are computed using mixed integer programming methods. The variables that are considered include countries greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water pollution and forest bene ts, as from the dataset of the World Bank. In the overall index of environmental quality land without forest contributes the most (with a weight around 71%), GHG emissions contribute with around 25% and water pollution contributes less (with around 4%). Moreover, countries are ranked according to their index of environmental quality and their rankings are compared with those of the Kyoto Protocol and alternative environmental indices. Then, employing a complementary SD approach, pairwise SD tests are employed to examine the dynamic progress of each separate variable over time, from 1990 to 2010, within 5-year horizons. Furthermore, pairwise SD tests are used to examine the major industry contributors to the GHG emissions and water pollution at any given time, to uncover the industry which contributes the most to total emissions and water pollution. It turns out that the components that are assigned high (low) weights in the SD approach are the ones that are the driving/fast-moving (holding back/slow-moving) variables in the sub- indices of GHG emissions and water pollution.

The government of Nepal has established five Regional Monitoring and Supervision Offices (RMSO) and the National Management Information Project (NMIP, since 2004), for decision-making in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) sector. The Nepal has committed to ensuring that a minimum of 53% of the population will have access to sanitation by 2015 and will achieve 100% sanitation by 2017 and recent (2011) coverage were 80% water and 43% sanitation. The leave of toilet coverage has increased from approximately 6% in 1990 to 43% as of 2009/2010, annual growth rate each year’s therefore equates 1.9%. If the present trend continues, the toilet coverage will be only 80% against the national target of 100% by 2017. In addition, 25.4% people are poor and 29% are landless, besides sanitation policy of Nepal does not provide subsidies for the poor and needy to install latrines. It is however rather unclear how this system works in practice for decision making on the basis of present data, models and tools which has been implemented through the existing monitoring and reporting system of RMSO/NMIP. This qualitative study was conducted through participant observation method to assess the gaps between design and practical outcomes of data, models and tools to minimize performance dilemma. The findings shows that RMSO/NMIP has been using inappropriate many formats for data collection, conducting different methodologies at a same time and data being double counted in some cases that influence poor decision making in this sector. The study has found some gaps; like data collecting, data use for project management and follow up, processing and presenting, developing indicator and survey and forth, and also offer some recommendations to overcome complexities to collect appropriate data at WASH sector in Nepal.

The theoretical claim for stakeholder participation in order to achieve sustainable policy outcomes is prominent in the literature. Empirical evidence substantiating this claim is, however, lacking. The complex characteristics of the concepts of sustainability and participation demand a systematic approach in which method develops from theory. We propose a qualitative assessment approach based on theoretical considerations. We deliberately restrict our approach not to prove causalities but to demonstrate tendencies. Our methodological starting point refines the complex interrelation between collective participation and sustainability by qualitatively assessing the value of the two concepts separately before looking for mutual or opposing trends. Based on theory, both concepts are re-split into two dimensions. Collective participation is re-split into 1. inclusion and 2. influence and sustainability is re-split into 1. the external impact of decisions and 2. the internal capacity to face pressures. For each dimension the approach combines an abstracting point-based scaling system with explanatory narratives. This ensures the comparability of different cases and at the same time the transparency and reliability of the assessment. By matching and comparing the previous scaling results in the end, the assessment procedure explores whether the degree of collective participation and the degree of sustainability are rather synchronic or opposite. We exemplify our approach with an example of local level non-governmental neighbourhood governance in India and review primary data on the agitation for green spaces and slum eviction in Hyderabad. This application outlines the disregard for diversity among stakeholders and the cost-benefit assessment of sustainability as remaining theoretical and methodological items for the amendment of our assessment approach in its current version. After refinement the presented approach is intended for the application on diverse cases of direct decision-making and for the meta- analysis and comparison of secondary case-studies as well as for the analysis of primary qualitative data.

Climate change policy is a prime example for the growing importance of expert ad-vice to inform decision‐making. Consequently, a plethora of advisory bodies and pro-cesses have emerged around the world. However, there are marked differences in the way the interactions between science and politics are organized and practiced depending on a country’s political system and culture. The degree of political compe-tition, the role of state vis-à-vis non-state actors and the dominant modes of interest mediation provide specific conditions for the ways expertise is consulted and used in decision-making. Against this background, the paper presents the landscape of scientific advice in Austrian climate policy and asks in how far the traditionally strong culture of corporat-ism in Austrian politics manifests itself in practices of climate policy advice. Concep-tually, the paper draws on analytical dimensions derived from the concepts of “na-tional styles of policy-making” and “civic epistemology”. Methodically it bases on an interview series and a workshop with representatives from science, politics, and in-termediary organizations. Our analysis provides a differentiated picture: the neo-corporatist culture still leaves its imprint in Austrian climate policy advice. But at the same time, the emergence of a new policy field, such as climate policy, undoubtedly opens up possibilities for new actors and forms of policy advice.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the Russian climate change discourse. Three major sectors were examined in this study: the Russian scientific school and the development of its understanding of climate change since the XIX century to the present day; the international dimensions and the involvement of the Russian Federation in the international climate change mitigation process facilitated by the Kyoto Protocol, and the media coverage of the climate change issues as seen by the newspapers: Vedomosti, Rossijskaya Gazeta and Kommersant. The dynamics in the climate change related articles was studied for the period of 2004-2008 and interesting co-occurrences were found with the important national and international climate change policy events. As a result of this study, an institutional structure of the climate change debate was portrayed using the media discourse analysis. Over 300 organizations taking part in the discourse in 2008 (of which 136 were Russian). The research highlighted 19 policy process categories, to which the articles were related; leading to 40 public debated categories related to the identified policy categories. The networks of organizations clustered around different climate change policy processes and public debates are presented in the international and Russian context. It is concluded that the most significant involvement of the Russian actors in the climate change policy debates in 2008 is observed in the government and science sectors, with the involvement of NGOs and the Media being much lower. The paper contains 18 figures and 7 tables and is accompanied by two Annexes. Annex 1 presents a structured list of organizations mentioned in the chosen newspapers in relation to climate change discussions, where organizations are grouped into international and Russian and according to the sector of society they represent. Annex 2 lists all organizations as they appear in the network diagrams (Fig. 15-18) with the respective ID numbers and website addresses for further enquiries.

Environment has had a relatively low priority in Turkey. Environmental concerns have been too often superseded by development interest in local decision-making. Strengthened environmental efforts from national government, provincial authorities, and municipalities are required to achieve environmental convergence with the European Union. Despite progress in providing environmental statistics and indicators, the need for integrated studies on environmental sustainability both national and subnational levels is still urgent. The objective of this study is to measure and compare environmental sustainability at sub-national level by using AHP. The proposed model is implemented both the selected sub-regions (NUTS 2 level) and their provinces (NUTS 3 level). In the analysis, SuperDecisions software v.2.2.1 is used and two alternative groups are evaluated according to eleven criteria namely, population density, energy consumption, green area, land use, total disposal, non-treated wastewater, water consumption, number of cars, traffic accidents, SO2 and PM10 emissions. The results indicate that at NUTS 2 level, İstanbul (TR10) the largest city in Turkey with 18% of total population and also one of the most populated cities in Europe is ranked (0.267133) first out of five. İstanbul is followed by regions TR42 Kocaeli, Sakarya, Düzce, Bolu, Yalova (0.189030) and TR41 Bursa, Eskişehir, Bilecik (0.186964) while TR21 Tekirdağ, Edirne, Kırklareli (0.170595) is rated as the least environmentally sustainable region. On the other hand, at NUTS 3 level TR424 Bolu has the highest ranking (0.132935), followed by TR412 Eskişehir (0.121052) and TR413 Bilecik (0.088625). The least environmentally sustainable provinces are TR211 Tekirdağ (0.046646) and TR421Kocaeli (0.037254), respectively. TR100 İstanbul (0.051545) is ranked 11th out of 14.