In the Amazon, environmental governance (EG) is an important multi-stakeholder approach to the sustainable management of natural resources. There is by now a large theoretical literature on the many requirements for effective EG. There is also extensive empirical literature on EG in the Amazon. While empirical work in the Amazon has advanced our understanding of EG, it also has important limitations. There remains a need to unpack the many requirements for effective EG to identify violations of governance criteria to explain cases where EG is ineffective. There is also a need for multi-case comparative analyses of EG across diverse parts of the Amazon to identify common explanations for ineffective EG. Therefore, we review multi-criteria frameworks for the evaluation of EG, noting their contributions and differences. We draw on three recent frameworks for evaluating EG to suggest an integrated framework that can be applied to multiple cases for comparative evaluation. We argue that the use of an integrated framework for the identification of violations of specific criteria for effective EG can guide targeted conservation action. We then briefly discuss five study cases in the Amazon to outline how we could apply the integrated framework to identify unmet criteria to account for ineffective EG. We identify commonly unmet criteria for ineffective EG across the five cases. The identification of common criteria violated across cases can provide a basis for broader conservation strategies to improve EG.

Concomitant with an increase in the global illegal wildlife trade has been a substantial increase in research within traditional conservation-based sciences and conservation and green criminology. While the integration of criminological theories and methods into the wildlife conservation context has advanced our understanding of and practical responses to illegal wildlife trade, there remain discrepancies between the number of empirical vs. conceptual studies and a disproportionate focus on a few select theories, geographical contexts, and taxonomic groups. We present three understudied or novel applications of criminology and criminal justice research within the fields of fisheries, forestry, and wildlife conservation. First, we highlight criminological research on the application of corruption prevention in combating the illegal wildlife trade. Corruption has increasingly been getting attention from the non-governmental sector; however, there has been limited research aimed at understanding institutional opportunity structures, local conceptualizations of corruption, and the corresponding prevention strategies within conservation contexts. Second, we discuss the pre-emptive application of compliance theories when designing and monitoring Community-Based Conservation (CBC) programs such as community forestry, non-timber forest products, and community patrol programs. Applying opportunity theory and social development strategies are two suggestions to improve the effectiveness of CBCs in forestry and beyond. Finally, we present a discussion on recidivism (i.e., repeat offending) and non-instrumental or novel responses, utilizing illegal fishing as a case study. We present two alternative methods to traditional forms of punishment: restorative justice and community-based approaches. Lastly, we will present a diversity of priority research agendas within each of these topics.

There is an extensive literature on environmental governance, which refers to multi-stakeholder processes to arrive at collective decisions about how natural resources will be managed. Recent work on environmental governance has focused on outcomes in terms of social-environmental sustainability. However, questions remain about the effectiveness of environmental governance in practice for yielding sustainable social or environmental outcomes. In cases where environmental governance processes prove ineffective, political ecology offers analytical approaches involving explanations that can account for unsustainable outcomes. In addition, an emergent literature on environmental governance provides frameworks to evaluate its effectiveness by unpacking it with regard to diverse criteria. These two literatures together permit analysis of how political ecology and other potential explanations can account for ineffective environmental governance in terms of specific unmet criteria. Analysis of ineffective environmental governance is likely to be especially valuable in a comparative perspective, in which multi-case studies can reveal the extent to which political ecology explanations predominate across cases. We focus on the Amazon, a large region with high social and biological diversity and where competing stakeholders engage in conflict over governance of natural resources. We pursue a comparative analysis of five cases where environmental governance has been ineffective in terms of sustainable outcomes. In each case, we identified five key explanations for ineffective environmental governance. We then coded those explanations with regard to whether they invoke issues highlighted by political ecology. We also coded them considering environmental governance evaluation frameworks to identify the unmet criteria for environmental governance to be effective. We then pursued a comparative analysis of similarities and differences across the cases. The findings indicate that political ecology issues are predominant among explanations for ineffective environmental governance across all five cases. The results also reveal which environmental governance evaluation criteria are most often unmet among the cases. The findings highlight the importance of political ecology for understanding ineffective environmental governance, and permit delineation of specific criteria for effective environmental governance that can be the focus of strategies to improve environmental governance for sustainability.

A clear consideration for designing strong climate policy is to account for the perception of the seriousness of climate change among citizens. In order to understand climate change perceptions in the European Union (EU), this study relies on Eurobarometer survey data to examine the impacts of place-based factors, including regional spaces and place attachment to supra-national spaces. The results indicate that regional differences and place attachment to the EU are strong predictors of climate change concern, net of the effects of other factors. These findings suggest that place-based indicators can serve as a useful analytical tool for the study of climate change public opinion. The study concludes by providing implications and suggestions for future research on climate change public opinion and climate policy.

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