When Britain joined the European Union in 1973, virtually all aspects of its environmental policy were determined at the national level within Britain. Thirty years on, the policy and political landscape of environmental politics has changed beyond all recognition. Over recent years, EU...

The United Kingdom is an international leader in the application of environmental policy appraisal (EPA). From the late 1980s until 2004, the UK's system sought to produce ex-ante assessments of the potential environmental impacts of different policy options. Critics maintain that it had a very...

We undertake a series of tests examining the extent to which the affect heuristic (Slovic et al., 2002) is or is not triggered by changes in the framing and hence context of assessments of hypothetical gamble tasks using a rating scale response mode. Our initial investigations examine the...

Recent research suggests that, in some situations, numeric information may lack the 'evaluability' of visual representations of the same data. In such cases, reliance upon numeric information exacerbates tendencies for survey respondents to rely upon heuristics rather than their underlying...

Sustainable consumption is increasingly on the policy menu, and local organic food provision has been widely advocated as a practical means of making the desired changes to conventional production and consumption systems. This paper presents the first empirical evaluation of a local organic food...

This paper reviews the contemporary debate and the now long standing role of CBA in UK and European environmental policy appraisal and looks forward to possible future applications. The position taken is that despite its limitations CBA still has an important part to play in environmental policy...

This paper analyses the integration of environmental standards into the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It focuses on the negotiation of the new environmental cross compliance rules, which were incorporated in the CAP's 2003 mid-term review and which now define a baseline...

The 'social economy' has become a buzz-word in UK politics over the last decade as the 'third sector' is now seen as a source of social inclusion, enterprise, training and employment by all political parties, and a site of alternative economic and social relations, by activists and academics....

Sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new environmental policy objective, but there is a limit to the changes in consumption behaviour which individuals can make within current socio-economic frameworks. The 'new economics' literature argues that sustainable consumption is...

Innovation and community action are two important areas of research and policy for sustainable development. Yet these two spheres of activity have not hitherto been linked. This paper builds a case for considering community action as a neglected, but potentially important, site of innovative...