Environmental Policy

The International Solar Alliance (ISA) is a new initiative launched at the 2015 Paris climate conference by India, jointly with France. The ISA is the first international organization headquartered in India and aims to promote solar electricity in the sunshine belt of states mostly between the tropic of Cancer and tropic of Capricorn. One of India's key aims in co-founding the ISA is as an instrument for geopolitical influence. However, India has limited capacity to provide financial support for this effort and is not a solar technology innovator or source of low-cost solar products such as panels or inverters (in contrast to far greater Chinese strength in these areas). This raises the question about whether and how India can reap geopolitical rewards from the ISA. This article explores the potential and limits for India to use the ISA as an instrument of geopolitics. We find that India's large domestic market and some of its recent success in scaling-up solar may provide some avenues for exercising leadership in the solar space and that those in turn may yield some opportunities for exercising wider geopolitical influence if those achievements are recognized. We theorize the stages of India's attempted journey from achieving solar leadership to exerting global influence and identify several barriers that must be overcome for success. These include overcoming challenges to its domestic solar program, ensuring institutional strength, and standing out in a crowded global renewables ecosystem of organizations.

To realize more sustainable and resilient urban social-ecological systems, there is great need for active engagement from diverse public agencies, non-profit organizations, businesses, natural resource managers, scientists, and other actors. Cities present unique challenges and opportunities for sustainability and resilience, as issues and organizations are frequently intertwined in networks of relations. Understanding and leveraging the range of knowledge types, motivations, skills, and goals of diverse participants and their networks is fundamental to sustainable and resilient cities. As efforts to examine and understand urban stewardship networks continue to emerge, it is increasingly clear that there are no structured or systematic frameworks to guide the integration of social and ecological phenomena. Such a framework could facilitate planning new urban stewardship network research, and provide a basis for comparisons among cities and their urban stewardship networks. In this paper, we develop and present a social-ecological framework for examining and understanding urban stewardship networks. To illustrate this framework and provide examples of its prospective and evaluative utility, we use examples from the U.S. Forest Service's Stewardship Mapping (STEW-MAP) network in the United States from Baltimore, MD, USA, New York City, NY, USA, San Juan, Puerto Rico, USA, and Seattle, WA, USA.

Green infrastructure approaches have attracted increased attention from local governments as a way to lower flood risk and provide an array of other environmental services. The peer-reviewed literature, however, offers few estimates of the economic impacts of such approaches at the watershed scale. We estimate the avoided flood damages and the costs of preventing development of floodplain parcels in the East River Watershed of Wisconsin