Environmental protection has not equally established itself as a permanent fixture in the political systems of all countries: to date, governments and entire societies have responded to environmental challenges in a variety of ways, and concrete environmental policy is still a highly national matter. Moreover, the perception of environmental problems varies considerably on a global scale. The reasons normally cited for these differences largely stem from the environmental policy debates themselves, e.g. poverty, ignorance, capital interests, etc. In contrast, this book shows that concrete environmental policy emerges from a complex interplay of mass media and political conflicts: first, the mass media provide the framework for national environmental policy through agenda-setting, framing and scandalization; second, the mass media thereby change values in the political and social discourse, e.g. by altering the perception of global commons and expanding the possibilities of interest articulation; and third, this can lead to political decision-making processes in which legal and other measures for environmental protection are enforced. The book systematically compares industrialized countries such as Germany and Japan with several rapidly emerging countries in South and Southeast Asia.

How spatial planning was transformed in Europe in the postwar period. Spatial planning is a typical European attempt to shape the development of societies by ordering their territory. It emerged in the nineteenth century from colonial settlement and conquest projections, urban reform, and conservative or even fascist fantasies of order. With this legacy, further burdened by the Soviet planned economy, spatial planning entered a new epoch after 1945. Since then, it has attempted to participate in the reconstruction of Europe and to accompany the path into modern society, mass democracy, and mass prosperity. Therefore, parallel to the social changes between 1945 and 1975, a reform of spatial planning began from Spain to Germany and from the Netherlands to Italy. However, these developments found themselves in competition with the specialized planning of the ministries, economic framework planning, and the market economy. In the process, spatial planning was transformed, becoming an institutional part of the European legal and social states.