Bettina Lange

This article presents an innovative framework for analysing environmental governance challenges by focusing on their Drivers, Responses and Impacts (DRI). It builds on and modifies the widely applied Drivers, Pressures, States, Impacts and Responses (DPSIR) model. It suggests, firstly and most importantly, that the various temporal and spatial scales at which Drivers, Responses and Impacts operate should be included in the DRI conceptual framework. Secondly, the framework focuses on Drivers, Impacts and Responses in order to provide a parsimonious account of a drought system that can be informed by a range of social science, humanities and science data. ‘Pressures’ are therefore considered as a sub-category of ‘Drivers’. ‘States’ are a sub-category of ‘Impacts’. Thirdly, and most fundamentally in order to facilitate cross-disciplinary research of droughts, the DRI framework defines each of its elements, ‘Drivers’, ‘Pressures’, ‘States’, ‘Impacts’ and ‘Responses’ as capable of being shaped by both linked natural and social factors. This is different from existing DPSIR models which often see ‘Responses’ and ‘Impacts’ as located mainly in the social world, while ‘States’ are considered to be states within the natural environment only. The article illustrates this argument through an application of the DRI framework to the 1976 and 2003–6 droughts. The article also starts to address how - in cross-disciplinary research that encompasses physical and social sciences – claims about relationships between Drivers as well as Impacts of and Responses to drought over time can be methodologically justified. While the DRI framework has been inductively developed out of research on droughts we argue that it can be applied to a range of environmental governance challenges

This article sets out two key dimensions of an eco-socio-legal perspective for understanding property rights in natural resources. These are, first, an analysis of how relationships between geographical place, law and society shape the content and application of property rights in natural resources. Second, an eco-socio-legal perspective foregrounds an analysis of how those who hold property rights to natural resources and third parties actually understand these rights, and thus how their meaning-making practices contribute to defining these rights. The first dimension of this eco-socio-legal perspective is fleshed out through a critical review of existing academic literature in the main Section Two of this article. The second dimension is illustrated through a qualitative empirical case study of English farmers’ understanding of their economic rights to water in Section Three of this article.

Climate change is associated with severe weather events also in the UK, such as alternating periods of flooding and drought. This article discusses how this increasingly important environmental challenge can be regulated. Current key regulatory tools for preventing and managing drought are drought planning, drought orders and permits, as well as the revocation and modification of abstraction licences. The article develops the metaphor of a governance space in order to understand how environmental science and economics knowledge practices inform the mobilization of these key regulatory tools. This builds on literature about the regulatory space metaphor, and further advances it by conceiving of law and information, two key resources for institutional actors in a governance space, as mediated by discourses. The article develops this argument by, first, reviewing in the introductory sections key provisions of European Union (EU) and English law in relation to regulatory tools for preventing water shortages and managing drought. It further develops this analysis in the subsequent section by examining what environmental science and economics knowledges are generated when particular regulatory tools for preventing or managing drought are applied. In the following main section the article then critically reviews literature about the regulatory space metaphor. It identifies a positivist understanding of information and law as a limitation of some of this literature. By building on contributions to this literature that adopt a discourse perspective, it suggests that law and information should be understood as discursively mediated. Building and maintaining reputations for effective drought management is one example of a discourse that mediates linked legal and information resources for drought management.

This article examines the reception of the education Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the UK as an aspect of Europeanization of national administrations. It addresses relationships between political and administrative actors in the process of responding to the education OMC. We argue that despite progress with institutionalization of the education OMC at the EU level, there is limited institutionalization of the education OMC at the national level. Against the backdrop of UK skepticism about engaging with the EU integration project, the interesting finding is the administrative strategies employed for deflecting EU influence on the national education space.

This introduction unpacks the key question that informs the articles in this special issue. How does a social sphere inform regulation and, more specifically, how can the regulatory capacity of a social sphere be harnessed, as an alternative or significant complementary force to state regulation and reliance on the self-regulatory capacity of markets? This question is salient and topical also in light of the search for new regulatory strategies and perspectives in the aftermath of the 2007 financial and subsequent EU sovereign debt crises, which have led to a major realignment of economy and society in a number of countries. This introduction argues that economic sociology is a crucial reference point for understanding more about the social practices that constitute business behavior. It enables to explore the scope and significance of often interlinked social and legal norms for regulating various transnational risks that economic activity can give rise to. The introduction therefore locates the quest for understanding more about the regulatory capacity of a social sphere in debates that draw on Karl Polanyi’s analysis of the embedding, disembedding, and re-embedding of economic activity into social norms. The introduction highlights one of the key themes developed in this special issue, the idea of society within economy which questions an assumed conceptual distinction between economy and society. This introduction concludes by specifying how the accounts of risk regulation developed in this special issue chart a path that is different from recent explorations of the role of a social sphere in regulation, which were conducted under the banner of “the sociological citizen,” “regulatory sociability,” and “collaborative governance.

This article starts from the assumption that economic sociology, including Karl Polanyi’s work, can contribute fresh perspectives to regulation debates because it opens up new understandings of the nature of economic activity, a key target of legal regulation. In particular this article examines Polanyi’s idea that society drives regulation. For Polanyi the “regulatory counter-movement” is society’s response to the disembedding – in particular through the proliferation of markets – of economic out of social relationships. Section One of the article identifies three key challenges that arise from this Polanyian take on regulation for contemporary regulation researchers. First, Polanyi focuses on social norms restraining business behavior, but neglects social norms embedded in law as also shaping regulation. Second, he seems to imply a clear-cut conceptual distinction between “economy” and “society.” Third, his analysis sidelines the role of interest politics in the development of regulation. Addressing the first of these three key challenges, Section Two of this article therefore argues that a Polanyian vision of “socialized” legal regulation should build on contemporary accounts of responsive law and regulation, which focus attention on social norms informing legal regulation. Section Three of this article tackles the second key challenge raised by Polanyi’s work for contemporary regulation researchers, that is, how to transcend a modernist perspective of “economy” and “society” as clearly demarcated, distinct fields of social action. It argues that discourse theory is an important alternative theoretical resource. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe, the article suggests that understanding “economy” and “society” as performed by open and relationally constructed discourses helps to capture interconnections between “economy” and “society” that become particularly visible when we analyze how specific regulatory regimes work at a medium- and small-scale level. These points are further brought to life in Section Four through a discussion of the European Union (EU) regulatory regime for trade in risky, transgenic agricultural products, and in particular the current reform debates about the consideration of the “socioeconomic impacts” of such products

This article examines the relationships between governance structures and regulatory approaches. It develops a typology to explain and fine-tune supranational regulatory models for the governance of markets. The article suggests, firstly, a range of regulatory options which are defined according to two dimensions: (a) the degree of centralization of regulation, which includes networks, meta-organisations, and single central authorities; and (b) the degree of invasiveness of regulation, which ranges from sunshine regulation to command and control approaches. The aim is to relate structural alternatives (considered in terms of centralization) to regulatory approaches (considered in terms of invasiveness). The typology here constructed is applied to analyse the governance structure of EU competition law. Secondly, the article focuses on the recent structural changes reshaping the governance of European financial markets. The reform is discussed through the lens of the typology. It appears that, differently from what was observed in the EU competition law model, the newly established European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) are part of a complex structural development, in which the separation between a highly invasive regulatory approach and a decentralised supervisory structure adds further complexity. The article concludes by noting a set of possible normative implications, suggested by the typology, to ensure a consistent governance model for financial markets regulation and supervision in the EU.