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Global Environmental Governance: Perspectives on the Current Debate (Open Access Book)

The topic of global environmental governance is central to my research, despite the fact that I am (for the most part) a comparativist and a specialist in North American environmental politics and policy. I have been teaching Global Environmental Politics at UBC for a few years now, and every semester, I try to shuffle topics around and improve my syllabus.

I am also committed (as much as humanly possible, of course) to an Open Access policy. Thus, I have not assigned a textbook in any of my courses, and only assign electronic journal readings, which are all accessible thanks to The University of British Columbia’s excellent subscriptions to databases. Luckily, many more of my colleagues are making their research accessible to the public.

One recent excellent publication that is now available online in its entirety is Global Environmental Governance: Perspectives on the Current Debate (2011, Editors: Lydia Swart and Estelle Perry, Center for UN Education Reform). As much of my research has focused on understanding the dynamics of cross-national environmental policy making, understanding the way in which the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) works and untangling the intricacies of global environmental politics at the supra-national scale are two areas that I try to keep myself up-to-date with.

There’s a broad spectrum of views on whether there should be a World Environment Organization (WEO), from the early work of Adil Najam to the most recent work of Frank Biermann et al. Maria Ivanova has done a superb job in offering a historical overview of the inner workings and structural strengths and deficiencies of the UNEP in her chapter in the edited volume by Swart and Perry. I am also fond of the work of Biermann, and his emphasis on the role of the nation state in the architecture of global environmental governance.

Kudos to my dear colleagues (I am friends with both Biermann and Ivanova) for being part of this effort to provide the general public with direct exposure to their analytical views on the ever-evolving architecture of global environmental governance. All the chapters contributed to this edited volume are worth a read. I will be using a couple in my Winter 2011 syllabus for Global Environmental Politics.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 29, 2011

Teaching with Social Media (Panel with Dr. Janni Aragon)

Social Media Camp Victoria 2011 (Amber Naslund and my talk with Janni Aragon"

Dr. Janni Aragon (University of Victoria) and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega (The University of British Columbia)

This past weekend I spoke at a panel with Dr. Janni Aragon from University of Victoria. Both Dr. Aragon and I teach in our respective universities’ Departments of Political Science, and we are both heavy users of social media in the classroom. We gave a 45 minute joint talk on social media in the classroom (I’ve spoken about this topic extensively in the past, both at Northern Voice 2011, at American University Social Media Club 2011 and I’ve also given workshops and keynotes on the topic).

My experience (e.g. the empirical evidence I have gathered, and the information Dr. Aragon shared during our talk) points to social media as an innovative tool that should not replace good teaching practices, but enhance them. We also discussed how using and implementing social media in the classroom should take into account issues of privacy, workload and learning curves for the social media platforms.

Have you experimented with social media in the classroom?

Posted in social media for teaching.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – June 7, 2011

A relational dialectics approach to water governance research

I have been reading Jamie Linton’s book What Is Water (UBC Press, 2010). Linton’s book builds a theoretical framework based on relational dialectics. Linton explores humans in their relationship to water (in some ways, achieving a degree of reification of water that almost borders with making water an actual living entity).

River overflow 4

Normally, I never write “personal posts” on my research blog as I have a personal one for that kind of endeavour. But what made me reconsider this approach was a recent visit to Deep Cove in North Vancouver. I hiked Quarry Rock with my NSPIL and as we passed several waterfalls, I stopped to reflect on what drives social scientists to work in the water field. I mentioned Linton’s work and indicated that perhaps scholars in the social sciences feel they have a special relationship with water.

river flow

For those of you who are well versed in constructivist approaches, or are fluent in some fields of the human geography literature, this notion of “exploring the relationship of humans to water” is perhaps not foreign. For a positivist, neo-institutionalist like me, it’s actually quite challenging. As a chemical engineer, I have seen water as a chemical compound that is vital for biological functions. As a social scientist, I see water as a substance that has historically been polluted and wasted. I see wastewater as the missing piece in the hydrological cycle puzzle. I don’t “feel” a particular “relationship to water”. I explore the rules and norms that govern water use (and misuse). But I fail to see myself in a particular kind of relationship with water itself.

Deep Cove/Arms Reach Bistro

Ironically, as I stopped in my tracks to listen to the water trickling, I looked at how pristine it was. I thought about the ways in which we continue to pollute it and how much it irks me to see water being wasted. And I made the comment that perhaps I’m beginning to understand this relational dialectics to water. I feel the need, the urge and the mandate to protect water, to teach people (primarily my students, but also my peers) how to conserve water and to encourage the appropriate treatment of wastewater.

I’m learning a new relational approach to water governance.

Deep Cove/Arms Reach Bistro

Posted in water policy, World Water Day.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 22, 2011

World Water Day (March 22nd, 2011)

Deep Cove and Indian Arm and Baden Powell Trail

World Water Day was instituted as an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. The theme for 2011 is Water for Cities. I recently spoke at the Western Division of the Canadian Association of Geographers, hosted by Simon Fraser University, on the urban geography of wastewater governance using the Lerma-Chapala river basin as a case study.

My research has had a focus on water since 2004, when I began analyzing the Lerma-Chapala river basin and exploring wastewater management. As a chemical engineer by training, and a social scientist by choice, I have been fascinated by why wastewater seems to be neglected in the social science literature. I have focused on water governance in cities, but more recently, I’ve begun exploring transboundary water issues, particularly across the US/Canada border.

I have also begun to explore the cultural perceptions of drinking water in the Metro Vancouver region, and I’m working on a couple of joint-authored papers on water poverty and energy poverty, teaching transboundary water conflict and the water soft path.

This World Water Day is also colored by the recent events in Japan which showcase how water can have both a vital role and a destructive one. Water for life, but also water can be lethal/destructive.

river flow

Posted in water policy, World Water Day.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – March 20, 2011

Feminist theories in public policy in Canada (Guest lecture by Dr. Janni Aragon, University of Victoria)

Last week, I had the pleasure of having Dr. Janni Aragon (University of Victoria), guest-lecture my class (POLI 350A Public Policy at The University of British Columbia) on “Feminist theories in public policy in Canada“. My course is designed to offer students a broad survey of various bodies of literature in the policy sciences field (from rational choice to feminism, traversing through neo-institutionalism and social constructivism). The course also teaches students to examine public policy problems from a multiplicity of analytical perspectives.

While I use a fairly diverse variety of theoretical and analytical tools in my research, I self-identify primarily as a neo-institutional theorist. Thus, while I understand a range of feminist theories of public policy, I prefer to defer to specialists in the field like Dr. Aragon, who has kindly offered her lecture slides for my students to read, and I am posting them here as a PDF document.

Thanks to Dr. Aragon for accepting my invitation. My students were very engaged and really pleased with her visit and talk.

Posted in public policy theories, teaching.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – January 29, 2011

The value of storytelling in teaching and research

Central Panel of Storytelling Session

photo credit: Choconancy1

Scholarly work on storytelling as a device to enhance the learning experience of students has shown the value of introducing learners to storytelling techniques. Some researchers have explored the use of storytelling to advance learning in the workplace (Swap et al 2001). For those of us who have been trained in the qualitative research methods, narrative inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly 2000) is a key strategy that helps us advance our understanding of individual and collective behaviour.

Egan (1989) championed the use of storytelling as a non-mechanistic approach to teaching. It is clear to me, from the works I have reviewed while thinking about this topic, scholarly research has been and continues to be undertaken on how storytelling can be successfully in teaching contexts, and as a qualitative research strategy. It recently all “clicked” in my brain when I realized that I have been doing a lot of storytelling both in my teaching and in my research. And I wanted to pass that on to my own students.

My former doctoral supervisor, someone I profoundly respect as a scholar and as an educator, taught me always to look at data with a rigorous and analytical mind, and to tell a story around the data. He asked me to look at data and think critically and make sense of it. And that’s how I conduct research, and how I hope my own students will undertake theirs. I told my students recently that I want them to do rigorous research, empirically-grounded and theoretically-informed.

In the classroom, I tell my students stories around the topics I research and the relevance of those research projects for the advancement of our understanding of comparative environmental and public policy. And the interesting thing is, my students react very positively to storytelling. This week, I taught a class in “full low-tech mode” (e.g. without any power point nor visuals, only the chalkboard and my own voice). I drew a road map of what I wanted my students to learn and as I was drawing the pieces of the puzzle, I put them together in an overview for them to see.

Students reacted extremely well, some even to the point of commenting “dear Dr. Pacheco-Vega, I really prefer low-tech classes”. I will continue to mix technology-supported lectures with “low tech” ones, but the experience really left me pondering on how valuable storytelling can be in my own teaching, and how much of it I use in my own research.

Posted in research, teaching.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 19, 2010

Transboundary Water Governance Panel Seminar at UBC’s IAR

I’m attending the Global Transboundary Water Governance panel organized by the Liu Institute for Global Issues and the Institute for Asian Research.

Posted in water policy.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – October 6, 2010

Crowdsourcing POLI 351 Environmental Policy and Politics

In previous years, I have taken the decision as to which topics I want to cover in my courses unilaterally. I decide what I think would benefit my students and proceed to explore those issues in depth. This year I am taking a somewhat unusual approach. I am seeking input from potential (and currently enrolled) students in my POLI 351 Environmental Policy and Politics course (’10W, Sep-Dec 2010). I have already decided on a list of topics, but I want to see whether there is more interest in one than another. As I have done previously, I will continue to be firmly against “examining the topic of the moment“, so I will not use climate change as the central issue throughout the course.

The current list of topics is as follows

1. Overview of global environmental issues
2. Global public goods
3. From Stockholm to Johannesburg – 30 years of sustainable development
4. The global commons
5. The analytical framework for environmental policy analysis: The policy regime framework (ideas, interests, institutions)
6. Interests in environmental politics
7. Institutions in environmental politics
8. Ideas in environmental politics
9. International environmental regimes (regime theory)
10. North American environmental policy (an overview)
11. The policy process – agenda setting to evaluation
12. Agenda setting – problem definition
13. Instrument design – instrument choice
14. Implementation and evaluation
15. Environmental policy instruments: regulation
16. EPI – market-based instruments
17. EPI – information-based and voluntary instruments
18. Corporate environmental strategy and CSR
19. ISO 14000 series, etc.
20. Environmental non-governmental organization and their strategies
21. Environmental perception, attitudes, values – environmental psychology

In my notes I wrote down that I did not like putting as much emphasis on international environmental politics. Given this, I am thinking to eliminate most of the global environmental politics/international environmental politics and add subject-area topics (e.g. water policy in Canada, solid waste policy in Canada, etc.). Bear in mind that this course is primarily focused on Canadian environmental policy, and that it is mostly a methodological course (e.g. at the end of the course the student should be able to analyze environmental policy).

Posted in teaching.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – August 5, 2010

Modeling the Behaviour of Participants in Social Networking Sites: Insights from Transnational Environmental Movements

I have always had a keen interest in understanding the behaviour of networks. I have previously studied how transnational environmental activist coalitions are built in North America. But before this year, I had never attempted to map out online social advocacy networks of environmentalists. I enjoy challenging myself by tackling uncharted territory and exploring whether a research topic is worth of me delving into. This a brand new talk that I just proposed (and got accepted) to give at Social Media Camp in October of 2010. This talk will synthesize my findings in what I think is still a fairly unexplored topic. The only other scholars who have explored this topic in some depth to my knowledge are Dr. Alexandra Samuel and Dr. Kate Milberry. My approach is much more network-based and explores the sociology of networks (using much of the work of Granovetter and my own empirical research).

The use of social networking sites (SNS) has become widespread in a variety of non-profit and social justice contexts. While before Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund would need to organize mail-in campaigns, now all it takes is a tweet, a Facebook wall message or a YouTube video to spark a movement.

Using insights gained from 10 years of empirical research in the field of environmental policy, as well as my experience as a power social media user, and drawing from the body of work of the sociology of networks, I posit that successful environmental activism campaigns are founded on the basis of a strong understanding and modeling of the
behaviour of participants in SNS.

Drawing from case studies I have analyzed in the past 10 years (and focusing on cases that have used social media in the past 24 months) I offer some general conclusions into how we can model the online behaviour of transnational environmental activists.

Posted in environmental NGOs, research, social media for public policy, social media for sustainability.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – July 13, 2010

Theory and methods in global environmental politics and comparative public policy

I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

My former PhD advisor is a very wise man and I owe a great deal of what I have accomplished to the formidable PhD training I had under his supervision. He shaped my thinking, enhanced my research skills by encouraging me and demanding from me to undertake empirical analyses. Even though my memorization capabilities and speed-reading skills have enabled me to master a broad variety of theoretical frameworks, my former PhD supervisor always wanted me to empirically test theories. Doing so gave me the best of both worlds (theory and empirics).

Throughout the course of my teaching, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I have refined my instructional skills and summarized in a few sentences what I demand from my students: I want my students’ research to be evidence-based, empirically-grounded and theoretically sound.

As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s quote has indicated above, it is foolish to theorize before one has data. Even though much of my comparative environmental policy work has focused in the development of better theories that allow us to understand why governments at various scales choose different policy options, I have years of training in empirical research methods, both qualitative and quantitative. I have undertaken in-depth qualitative studies (interviews and institutional ethnographies) and built massive datasets that have been explored through a variety of quantitative methods (including firm demographics and multivariate analysis).

Much as my students may think I’m too demanding, I strongly believe in providing them with a strong foundation in research methods. Even if I do not teach a methods course per se, I showcase examples of studies that have both sound theoretical grounding and robust empirical research methodologies. I think that the best long-lasting learning experience I can give any student is the self-confidence of knowing how to tackle a problem using empirical research methods.

Posted in comparative public policy, teaching.

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By Raul Pacheco-Vega – April 5, 2010