Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Who would have thought ten or fifteen years ago that one day it would be possible to earn a living from ecology? Who could have predicted the emergence of a whole new sector of the economy producing goods and services whose purpose is to reduce the environmental impact of industry, both large-scale and small-scale, farming, household and state infrastructure? The contributions in this book show that today a number of markets exist which respond to the demand for such goods and services. What we are talking about here is ecobusiness. The existence of the companies which supply these markets is based on the growing demand for technology and expertise which is dictated in turn by the ever-expanding and increasingly exigent body of environmental legislation. Furthermore, these new ecobusiness companies have effectively become the partners of the state in that through their research and development they advance the status of anti-pollution technologies which enable the legislature to raise its standards successively. Thus, it is in the interest of ecobusiness that the state compel industry, farmers, households and the state actors responsible for the construction and maintenance of public infrastructure to exploit its products and consultancy services to the full. This prompts the following questions with respect to the relationship between state services and companies involved in ecobusiness: who controls whom and is using whom?

The suggestion by today’s politicians, economics experts or environmental protection practitioners that the problem of increasing air pollution in urban areas could be solved by giving suitable medication to bronchitis sufferers, pregnant women and children would be greeted with outright incredulity. Such an approach would be deemed utterly unsuitable. A similar reaction would greet suggestions to deal with industrial air pollution by means of high industrial chimneys and to tackle water pollution by introducing massive volumes of clean water into the waste water systems. And yet, when I was young, precisely these strategies were considered rational by the vast majority of environmental specialists and politicians. This was the era when collective value concepts which saw the black smoke belching out of industrial chimneys as the very expression of progress, obscuring the fact that they embodied a risk for the population, were only beginning to be described as “irrational”. In fact, yesterday’s visionaries, a small minority, who, to no avail, hailed the pills and high industrial chimneys as a purely symptomatic policy response, were generally dismissed as irrational zealots arguing on a “purely emotional” basis.

The European Union’s COST Action 618 project sought to assess policy initiatives in institution building and information campaigns for urban air quality management. These efforts centred on limiting the growth of metropolitan traffic, which is the main source of urban atmospheric pollution in most major cities. While this volume focuses on the challenges and results of institution building for improved urban air quality, Action 618 has also produced a book that analyses information campaigns that have been conducted to combat air pollution.

In this contribution we present an outline of a new institutional regime for natural resources which takes into account the commonly agreed principle of sustainable development and the role public agencies may play in its governance. We start by describing the main features of sustainable development (14.1) and follow this with a discussion of its application in the management of natural resources (14.2). We then present a broad outline of the role public policies actually play in the allocation and consumption of natural resources (14.3). On the basis of these elements we then present an outline of the proposed resource quotas (14.4). This is followed by a more detailed description of the allocation and transfer of quotas within the framework of “Natural Resource Contracts (NRC)” (14.5), a discussion of some aspects of the governance of such a regime (14.6) and, finally, further arguments to support the selective application of such contracts (14.7).

There are few terms that are used in such an inflated manner as the word “sustainability”. Politicians, businesspeople, scientists and all kinds of advertisers consider themselves, their proposals, their articles and their beliefs to be more sustainable than the ones of their competitors. Listerning to them, one gets the impression that our world is the most sustainable one imaginable. Looking at reality, in most situations the exact opposite is true. Globalization accelerates all kinds of industrial, domestic and urban metabolisms and increasingly unbundled market mechanisms are becoming a serious threat for the survival of the reproductive capacities of our common natural resources. With the advancement of globalization and market liberalization, the need for solid institutional mechanisms capable of guaranteeing the survival of normally local and/or regional natural resources has tremendously increased in the last twenty years. Traditional environmental protection policies are incapable of doing this job. Like many other scholars and politicians, we believe that fundamental changes in the way we manage our common natural resources are inevitable if we claim to fight against the “plundering of our common wealth” ().