When international agreements fail to solve global problems like climate change, transnational networks attempt to address them by implementing global ideaspolicies and best practices negotiated at the global levellocally around the world. Grassroots Global Governance not only explains why some efforts succeed and others fail, but also why the process of implementing global ideas locally causes these ideas to evolve. Drawing on nodal governance theory, the book shows how transnational actors success in putting global ideas into practice depends on the framing and network capacity-building strategies they use to activate networks of grassroots actors influential in local social and policy arenas. Grassroots actors neither accept nor reject global ideas as presented by outsiders. Instead, they negotiate whether and how to adapt them to fit local conditions. This contestation produces experimentation, and results in unique institutional applications of global ideas infused with local norms and practices. Grassroots actors ultimately guide this process due to their unique ability to provide the pressure needed to push the process forward. Experiments that endure are perceived as successful, empowering those actors involved to activate transnational networks to scale up and diffuse innovative local governance models globally. These models carry local norms and practices to the international level where they challenge existing global approaches and stimulate new global governance institutions. By guiding the way global ideas evolve through local experimentation, grassroots actors reshape international actors thinking, discourse, organizing, and the strategies they pursue globally. This makes them grassroots global governors. To demonstrate this, the book compares transnational efforts to implement local Integrated Watershed Management programs across Ecuador and shows how local experiments altered the global debate regarding sustainable development and stimulated a new global movement dedicated to changing the way sustainable development is practiced. In doing so, the book reveals the grassroots level as not merely the object of global governance, but rather a terrain where global governance is constructed.

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as "indigenous" resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters.
At times indigenous knowledges represented a "middle ground" of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflict and struggle. The authors demonstrate how people claimed that their hybrid forms of knowledge were communal, religious, and traditional, as opposed to individualist, secular, and scientific, which they associated with European colonialism.
"Indigenous Knowledge and the Environment" offers comparative and transnational insights that disturb romantic views of unchanging indigenous knowledges in harmony with the environment. The result is a book that informs and complicates how indigenous knowledges can and should relate to environmental policy-making.
Contributors: David Bernstein, Derick Fay, Andrew H. Fisher, Karen Flint, David M. Gordon, Paul Kelton, Shepard Krech III, Joshua Reid, Parker Shipton, Lance van Sittert, Jacob Tropp, James L. A. Webb, Jr., Marsha Weisiger

Old men used to sit in corner stores and discuss business, work, and politics. Women used to come together and talk about the men as they took care of the home and children, or even more recently as a part of the workforce. Today, however, politics is a shunned topic, and conversation is all but dead. It is difficult to stay informed and talk with each other about life and politics.

It is even more difficult to stay informed on a technical topic such as energy and something as double-sided as politics. Yet it is imperative that people stay informed and well-connected to direct their government.

This book shows how the government (President, House and Senate, left and right) have destroyed the energy industry, taxed the middle class, and prevented well thinking, regular folks from solving our energy supply crisis. This book has thirty-three charts and graphs, most from bi-partisan or independent government sources to make a case for less government involvement in the energy industry. There are some astonishing revelations and a compelling case for reducing air emissions by 60 percent and creating jobs at the same time by building a particular type of new generation. This is a compelling argument that has never been presented before. I hope you enjoy the read.

Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political... a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required. In this ambitious and radical new volume of writings, some of the most exciting contemporary thinkers in the field take on the task of revealing and theorizing the extent of the ecologization of existence as the effect of our contemporary sociotechnological condition: together, they bring out the complexity and urgency of the challenge of ecological thought-one we cannot avoid if we want to ask and indeed have a chance of affecting what forms of life, agency, modes of existence, human or otherwise, will participate-and how-in this planet's future.

In Europe and other developed countries, much of the population live in small and medium sized towns. For many such places the pursuit of growth is no longer a viable strategic option. As the ability of small towns to compete with larger cities for private investment and government support diminishes, the number trapped in a spiral of long-term decline grows. Beginning with a brief overview of the global context, highlighting that urban shrinkage and decline is a widespread problem, Schlappa and Nishino illustrate how small towns can generate sustainable forward strategies in contrasting institutional contexts by fostering co-production, adjusting public facilities and right sizing the urban area. The analytical tools and practical examples provided by Schlappa and Nishino are relevant for political and administrative decisionmakers, leaders of civil society and business organisations in developing locally appropriate, creative and robust strategies to shrink smart and re-grow smaller.

This is a thoroughly revised and updated edition of an authoritative introduction to ecological modelling. Sven Erik Jorgensen, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ecological Modelling, and Giuseppe Bendoricchio, Professor of Environmental Modelling at the University of Padova, Italy, offer compelling insights into the subject. This volume explains the concepts and processes involved in ecological modelling, presents the latest developments in the field and provides readers with the tools to construct their own models.

The Third Edition features:
A detailed discussion and step-by-step outline of the modelling procedure.
An account of different model types including overview tables, examples and illustrations.
A comprehensive presentation of the submodels and unit processes used in modelling.
In-depth descriptions of the latest modelling techniques.
Structured exercises at the end of each chapter.
Three mathematical appendices and a subject index.

This practical and proven book very effectively combines the theory, methodology and applications of ecological modelling. The new edition is an essential, up-to-date guide to a rapidly growing field.

Presents the most commonly used model types with a step-by-step outline of the modeling procedure used for eachShows readers through an illustrated example of how to use each model in research and management settingsNew edition is revised to include only essential theory with a focus on applicationsIncludes case studies, illustrations, and exercises (case study of an ecological problem with full illustration on how to solve the problem)"

This study addresses the many initiatives to decrease industrial pollution emitting from the Pechenganikel plant in the northwestern corner of Russia during the final years of the Soviet Union, and examines the wider implications for the state of pollution control in the Arctic today. By examining the efforts of Soviet industry and government agencies, Finnish and Swedish officials, and Norwegian environmental authorities to curb industrial pollution in the region, this book offers an environmental history of the Arctic as well as a transnational, geopolitical history.