Boundaries, limits, landscapes and flows: An analytical framework for boundaries in natural resource management.

In times of increasing pressure on natural resources, resource boundaries have become more ambiguous. Resources are increasingly interlinked, and competing users may define a resource and its boundaries differently. At times, resource units are confined into "resource plots", while at other times they are "resource stocks". Nevertheless, according to Elinor Ostrom, "clearly defined boundaries" are an important design principle. Against this background, the aim of this article is to develop, based on the work of Achille Varzi, an analytical framework with the help of which a better understanding can be gained of boundaries and their ambiguities in CPR management. Applied to 33 publications from Elinor Ostrom, the framework shows that focus has been on spatial, social boundaries. Less attention has been paid to natural boundaries, and in particular to natural resource limits. Applied to three empirical cases from East Asia, the framework shows how a more nuanced understanding of boundaries and their ambiguities can inform environmental management on the role of ambiguity. On a theoretical level, the paper finds that we need to move away from understanding a resource as a plain landscape, to a landscape as composed of shifting equilibria of resource flows, the limits of which need to be incorporated in CPR management.

Overcoming the Challenges of Water, Waste and Climate Change in Asian Cities.

Unprecedented challenges in urban management of water, waste and climate change-amplified by urbanisation and economic growth-are growing in Asia. In this circumstance, cities need to be aware of threats and opportunities to improve their capacity in addressing these challenges. This paper identifies priorities, barriers and enablers of these capacities. Through the City Blueprint® Approach-an integrated baseline assessment of the urban water cycle-11 Asian cities are assessed. Three cities are selected for an in-depth governance capacity analysis of their challenges with a focus on floods. Solid waste collection and treatment and access to improved drinking water and sanitation can be considered priorities, especially in cities with considerable slum populations. These people are also disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate-related hazards. The high variation of water management performance among Asian cities shows high potential for city-to-city learning by sharing best practices in water technology and governance. Combining interventions, i.e., by exploring co-benefits with other sectors (e.g., transport and energy) will increase efficiency, improve resilience, and lower the cost. Although governance capacities varied among cities, management of available information, monitoring and evaluation showed to be reoccurring points for improvement. Cities are also expected to increase implementation capacities using better policy, stricter compliance and preparedness next to promoting community involvement. Consequently, the city transformation process can be more concrete, efficient and inclusive.

Managing manure from China's pigs and poultry: the influence of ecological rationality.

We have investigated manure management practices at three farm scales in Chinese pig and poultry production. The concept of ecological rationality was employed to explore empirically how environmental concerns drive adoption of environmental-friendly manure management technologies at different farm scales. The more developed Rudong County in Jiangsu Province and the less developed Zhongjiang County in Sichuan Province were chosen as cases for study of 258 animal breeders. On the contrary to our hypothesis, medium-scale farmers were not always found to be laggards in adoption of manure management technologies. Government ecological rationality played a key role to induce environmental-friendly technology adoption on its own, but also in cooperation with ecologically rational individual or network drivers. Authorities no longer applied their efforts in a conventional command-and-control way, but more in the form of incentives, stimulation, and information to farmers. Individual farmers in general showed low environmental responsibility in relation to manure handling.

Seeding the clouds to reach the sky: Will China's weather modification practices support the legitimization of climate engineering?

In this Perspective, we discuss whether in times of quickly proceeding global environmental change, radical global interventions like "climate engineering" may gain legitimacy in China and eventually be deployed or supported. We argue that one cornerstone for whether climate engineering, and solar radiation management in particular, could gain legitimacy in China, is its current weather modification programme. In China, weather modification is institutionalized and deployed on a large scale, and current narratives around the legitimacy to intervene into the local climate may provide a rationale for interventions such as solar radiation management. In the end, in the same way as Deng Xiaoping coined the phrase "stepping on stones to cross the river" in the era of China's Industrial Civilization, narrating China's "Ecological Civilization" may want to make use of "seeding the clouds to reach the sky". [See ESM for a summary of the article in Chinese.].

Mitigating land pollution through pesticide packages - The case of a collection scheme in Rural China.

Pesticide packages that are discarded on agricultural land can contaminate water bodies and pose a threat to the environment and human health. Little is known about how developing countries deal with this kind of land pollution. While in developed countries, packages are collected by professional organizations, the smallholder context in developing countries makes the collection of this waste much more difficult. This paper introduces and analyses a successful Pesticide Package Collection Scheme in one of the poorest regions in China, i.e. Guangxi Province. The purpose of the paper is to analyze and discuss how such a scheme can be established by multiple actors. The paper finds that the underlying success factors for establishing such a scheme are 1.) that a scheme piggy-bags on existing economic structures that reach out to farmers (e.g. associations); 2.) that the scheme itself facilitates actors' exchange of resources to establish a temporary resource equilibrium; 3.) that all stakeholders obtain returns on their investment, even if the quality and time scale of these returns may differ. The initiation of the scheme by a pesticide company however increased both its political and market influence. Caution hence has to be paid to whether the short-term improvement in land pollution happens at the expense of a dependency on and increased use of certain kinds of pesticides.

Environmental potentials of policy instruments to mitigate nutrient emissions in Chinese livestock production.

To minimize negative environmental impact of livestock production, policy-makers face a challenge to design and implement more effective policy instruments for livestock farmers at different scales. This research builds an assessment framework on the basis of an agent-based model, named ANEM, to explore nutrient mitigation potentials of five policy instruments, using pig production in Zhongjiang county, southwest China, as the empirical filling. The effects of different policy scenarios are simulated and compared using four indicators and differentiating between small, medium and large scale pig farms. Technology standards, biogas subsidies and information provisioning prove to be the most effective policies, while pollution fees and manure markets fail to environmentally improve manure management in pig livestock farming. Medium-scale farms are the more relevant scale category for a more environmentally sound development of Chinese livestock production. A number of policy recommendations are formulated as conclusion, as well as some limitations and prospects of the simulations are discussed.