Resilience management goes beyond risk management to address the complexities of large integrated systems and the uncertainty of future threats, especially those associated with climate change

The European Union has played a leading role in pushing for the establishment, ratification, and meaningful implementation of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, although it still has significant efforts to make to achieve its target of an 8 percent cut of greenhouse gas by 2008-2012 relative to the 1990 level. This article explores the political factors behind continued EU leadership in climate change. It argues that a few individual states (including Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the UK) played an essential role in establishing the EU's agenda in this domain. However, the decentralized governance structure of the EU has also encouraged a process of mutual reinforcement, whereby individual states, the European Commission, and the European Parliament are competing for leadership. (c) 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A decade of climate change negotiations almost ended in failure because of the different policy approaches of the industrialized states. Japan, Germany, and the United States exemplify the deep divisions that exist among states in their approaches to environmental protection. Germany is following what could be called the green social welfare state approach to environmental protection, which is increasingly guided by what is known as the precautionary principle. In contrast, the US is increasingly leaning away from the use of environmental regulations, towards the use of market-based mechanisms to control pollution and cost-benefit analysis to determine when environmental protection should take precedence over economic activities. Internal political divisions mean that Japan sits uneasily between these two approaches. Miranda A. Schreurs uses a variety of case studies to explore why these different policy approaches emerged and what their implications are, examining the differing ideas, actors, and institutions in each state.

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