Will paper recycling reduce the environmental impact of the European pulp and paper sector? If so, is maximal paper recycling the best policy to optimize the life cycle of the pulp and paper sector? We explore these questions using an approach that combines materials accounting methods and...

Since the mid-1990s, the aim of keeping climate change within 2 °C has become firmly entrenched in policy discourses. In the past few years, the likelihood of achieving it has been increasingly called into question. The debate around what to do with a target that seems less and less achievable...

Federal theories are once again enjoying renewed interest within European Union studies, where they potentially have multiple uses, including shedding more light on the enduringly puzzling issue of task allocation. Yet their overtly rationalist nature means that they may underestimate the...

The concept of ecosystem services is increasingly being promoted by academics and policy makers as a means to protect ecological systems through more informed decision making. A basic premise of this approach is that strengthening the ecological knowledge base will significantly enhance...

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, more widely known as ‘Rio+20’, was a significant global political event, but it left many important questions relating to the future of sustainability governance unanswered. This paper introduces a theme issue on “Governing...

The ‘ecosystem services approach’ (ESA) to policy making has refocused attention on how knowledge is embedded in policy. Appraisal has long been identified as an important venue for embedding, but suffers from well-known difficulties. This paper examines the extent to which an ESA appears in...

We explore the links between environmental change, human migration, and adaptation in the relatively mature governance system of the European Union (EU). It is shown that these connections are limited and, when made, tend to be security focused. This situation inhibits scope for migration (both...

Policy appraisal has spread rapidly throughout the OECD and beyond, as has the associated academic literature. In this paper we present the findings of a systematic review of this literature. We assess the extent to which developments in academic research and in everyday appraisal practices have...

The European Union (EU) has sought to lead the world in the adoption of ambitious climate change mitigation targets and policies. In an attempt to characterize and broadly explain the resulting pattern of EU climate governance, scholars have employed the term “multi-level reinforcement.”...