Category: Environment and Sustainability

The world has been grappling with energy efficiency for decades.  Much attention has been focused on how government can encourage energy efficiency, but there has been essentially none on industry perspectives of which government interventions are necessary to encourage these actions to become the norm.  We address this gap through a study of industry views…Continue Reading Industry perceptions of government interventions: generating an energy efficiency norm

How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem – particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions…Continue Reading Ostrom, Floods and Mismatched Property Rights

Extinction the Facts by Sir David Attenborough showed the crisis we all face in preserving our planets biodiversity.  Many of these problems are global or transnational:  global warning, Illegal wildlife trafficking, overfishing our oceans…  This means our responses must be international.  As the programme showed, when there is political will to act,  we can take…Continue Reading Extinction the Facts by Sir David Attenborough

The notion that a plastics treaty is necessary is gaining traction, but there is less agreement as to its content. Some, including this author, have suggested that a plastics treaty should be modelled on treaties such as the Montreal Protocol, which sets out a broad commitment to end the use of a particular material and…Continue Reading The Montreal Protocol or the Paris Agreement as a Model for a Plastics Treaty?

The environment is one of the political issue areas identified earliest in the post-Cold War context as susceptible to securitisation (see Deudney 1990), defined as a way of treating an issue that emphasises existential stakes and licences exceptional ameliorative measures (Wæver 1995). In global environmental politics, such a quality has become unmistakable, amid developments increasingly represented as…Continue Reading Crisis, deliberation, and Extinction Rebellion

This article critically re-examines the parliamentary proceedings between 1928 and 1938 that led to the Inheritance (Family Provision) Act 1938, in particular looking at the reasons why Parliament sought to limit testamentary freedom. University of Lincoln, College of Social Science Research Richard Hedlund, University of Lincoln, Lincoln Law School  …Continue Reading The End to Testamentary Freedom

“For the past five months (since June 2019), the city of Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, has been the scene of large-scale anti-government protests. Originally, these protests were against an extradition bill tabled in the Legislative Council, and which would have allowed for the extradition of suspects, not…Continue Reading A Legal-Historical Chronicle of Rule-of-Law Narratives in Hong Kong. In: Global Legal History: A Comparative Law Perspective.

In contemporary debates on the authority of global institutions, there is an important yet often overlooked organisational curiosity: namely, the International Seabed Authority (‘ISA’). The ISA reflects a highpoint in international communitarian governance. Premised around traditional notions of access, control and allocation of deep seabed resources, its mandate is both invariably spatial-temporal, and yet also…Continue Reading A Guardian of Universal Interest or Increasingly Out of its Depth?