Climate change and other global processes shape and are shaped by local process such as land use change. Does the idea of sustainability help us take account of both human well-being and the environment at the local and global level? To answer, we have to unpack what is involved in decision-making and what sustainability means. Decisions are made in multiple roles: consumer, citizen, role model for others, organizational participant, investor, and resource manager. In all of these roles, context, including inequalities, shapes opportunities and constraints and thus decisions. Context often reflects a long history of previous decisions, including discrimination. Thus context and choice are two views of the same process.

Indonesia represents an interesting case for analysis of the relationship between multi-level governance and climate governance for three main reasons. It is a highly decentralized country; it is a major contributor to land-based greenhouse gas emissions; and it is extremely vulnerable to climate change. The chapter first provides a broad overview on Indonesia’s climate governance in the context of decentralization, and then focuses on sub-national governance of climate change mitigation in the land use sector, the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Our research suggests that Indonesia illustrates key advantages of highly decentralized polity structures. Political autonomy has facilitated sub-national climate action through direct engagement of provinces with transnational climate initiatives, and the multiplicity of forums for policymaking has allowed certain provinces to champion sub-national engagement in climate change policy. Decentralization has also facilitated experimental policies in the form of innovative sub-national jurisdictional approaches to climate action in the land use sector. At the same time, peculiarities of the decentralization approach in the land use sector have led to perverse incentives that hamper forest-based climate change mitigation action.

The sanctuary of Artemis on the island of Korkyra, modern Corfu, is presented as a case study of the relationship between the changing environment and the monumentalization of Greek sanctuaries through Doric stone architecture. Although the sculptural decoration of the Artemis temple, which is one of the earliest Doric temples known so far, is relatively well preserved, modern scholars disagree on the interpretation of the sculptures. The question of how the representations of Medusa and other mythological figures on the pediments and metopes related to the divinity worshipped in the sanctuary and to the local context are particularly controversial. However, as the chapter argues, the builders of the temple had no interest in highlighting this relationship in the first place. The temple and its sculptural decoration were meant to express Panhellenic values and standards rather than local traditions. Thus, the local elite of Korkyra presented themselves as part of a Panhellenic elite network. At the same time, the elite showed the local population that they were taking care of the religious landscape in an unstable and radically transformative situation.

One thoroughgoing assumption of both classical liberal and neoliberal thinking has to do with the supreme importance of property rights. Accompanying most liberal notions of property ownership is the ability to exclude all others from using your property should you wish to. This has led to a curious phenomenon – the absentee landlord. The absentee landlord owns property, controls its use, and profits from it despite not being physically present or practically using the property. In this chapter, Goel looks at how a group of holy, third-gender people in India, hijras, think about property ownership and use. Due to a century or two of colonial degradation, hijras have been stripped of many of their rights to property and its use, and occupy a marginal place in Indian society today. As a result, they maintain an elaborate system of communally maintained use-rights in the cities they live in, apportioning the ability to walk mendicant rounds and grant blessings. This chapter, more than just offering a strict dichotomous set of cases, invites the reader to think about what possession of land or space looks like when we abandon contractual exclusive ownership and instead embrace rights that come from use. The chapter thereby moves beyond the neoliberal tradition and takes the reader right to the edge of the classical liberal tradition of thought, with its emphasis on property rights as an intrinsic component of individual liberty.

This chapter compares the ways that two similarly sized cities, Chicago and Amsterdam, have chosen to govern their streets. Chicago sold a seventy-five-year concession to manage street parking to a consortium of private investors, whereas Amsterdam’s government maintains the ability to directly govern its streets. In turn, Chicago is an illustration of how privatization of a common good according to money-lending logics, far from allowing for flexibility and efficient governance, completely prevents a city from changing with the times. Chicago has lost control over its own streets and can no longer decide what their best use is without paying an extortionate price. Any governing of a shared communal space that has a broader concern than generating profit for a private corporation is here effectively undermined by allowing marketized parking. For the purposes of this book, the Chicago/Amsterdam comparison illustrates the limitations of using privatized business actors to efficiently govern shared city space. It also serves as a counterexample to the neoliberal dogma that government should abstain from planning, because their attempts at doing so cannot outperform the market.

This chapter studies the role of the EU and EU Member States in relation to disasters and land-use planning. The work analyzes how land-use planning can evaluate and manage risks to avoid disasters, paying special attention to European use of the precautionary principle. The analysis uses especially, but not only, the example of the Spanish legal system, taking into account its inclusion in the more general EU legal system. The study also considers private and public liability in relation to disasters, underlining how, in recent years, EU law and European caselaw have created a common framework based on the right to good administration. The study includes a reference to the famous case decided by the Dutch Supreme Court at the end of 2019 ordering the Government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the duty of due diligence or due care. Finally, this chapter explores possible consequences of maladministration when taking planning decisions in relation to possible public liability, using two real Spanish cases as specific examples.

Never has disaster planning been more important than in this time of the climate’s change. In western United States, climate change has produced a number of stark effects already evident. None, however, is more dramatic than wildfire’s growth from seasonal annoyance to nearly year-round threat to life. Climatic changes butt up against the west’s extraordinary population growth, which increasingly brings the urban edge of population centers into areas that once burned with little or no concern for loss of life or property. As suppression costs for wildfire have soared, a new emphasis on planning for wildfire in this wildland-urban interface (WUI) has taken on strategic importance. This chapter provides a basic structure for engaging wildfire planning in WUI communities, including rural communities that can be especially susceptible to wildfire but also distrustful of government action.

Disaster recovery is challenging in any geographic region. However, rural communities differ in several key ways from urban ones, which can make rural disaster recovery uniquely difficult. This chapter walks through the cycle of a rural community’s theoretical experience with natural disaster by breaking the cycle down into two phases: disaster preparedness before disaster strikes and disaster response/recovery afterward. The chapter first examines several factors contributing to under-preparedness. First, rural land use planning has historically been less regulated and more haphazard that urban land use planning. This means that rural communities may face issues with disorganization, sprawl, and physical dangers that are less common in the average city, in addition to being less likely than urban communities to have high-quality Hazard Mitigation Plans. More limited planning also contributes to less-diversified and more vulnerable economies that are less resilient in the face of stresses. Second, the related problem of limited rural floodplain management exacerbates these issues. And third, rural environmental injustice receives relatively limited attention, but is an important factor in placing low-income and minority communities in rural regions at a higher risk of vulnerability to natural disasters. The chapter then turns to two issues illustrating rural communities’ disadvantages in disaster recovery. First, approaches to disaster recovery often fail to serve rural needs effectively. In general, “[h]istory and current experience have shown that [FEMA] aid, subsidized insurance, local long-term rebuilding programs, and even charitable giving” tend to flow to those who already have more resources. Rural residents and communities have less capacity and support even to navigate application processes for relief. They also have more limited access to necessary amenities like homeless shelters in the aftermath of disasters. Second, the idea that all rural residents vote against environmental regulations that would offer better protections serves to mask rural regions’ most vulnerable populations. For example, some commentary after hurricanes in the South declares these natural disasters to reflect “hurricane karma,” or punishment for regional voting patterns. Such a stance is problematic in a variety of ways, and serves to obfuscate the needs of high-risk groups in regions represented by conservative legislators. The following discussion addresses each of these challenges in the preparedness phase and recovery phase in turn. The chapter concludes with thoughts for potential reforms.

The scaling-back, scaling-up, and scaling-down of liberal nation states since the 1970s have fundamentally changed the contexts in which state responses to squatting must be understood. The impacts of neoliberalism, globalization, and localism – scaling-back, scaling-up, and scaling-down the nation-state – have provoked new questions for liberal property theories. While the foundations of the classical nineteenth century liberal state and twentieth century liberal ownership societies – which underpin liberal theories of private property – have shifted, the “invisibility” of the state in liberal property theories has meant that this fundamental change has attracted relatively little attention. Against the backdrop of the global financial crisis and Great Recession, the politics of “austerity” and affordable housing crises, the re-emergence of squatting as an issue of political concern and the use of state power to respond to unlawful occupation have re-positioned debates about “private property” in the public realm. For property scholarship to succeed in understanding and advancing solutions to contemporary property problems, it is important that our theoretical and methodological frameworks are attuned to the real contexts of state action.

States make decisions to allocate resilience to (or withhold resilience from) stakeholders across these networked interests through the lens of the state’s own vulnerability and resilience needs. We have revealed how the state’s “other-regarding” responsibility to govern in the “collective interest” – allocating resilience to shore up particular (competing) individual, aggregated and/or institutional claims – and the state’s own “self-regarding” need to shore up its resilience vis-à-vis citizens, markets, and society – interact to produce and provoke state responses to squatting. Finally, because Resilient Property analyses seek to explore as much as possible of the “problem space,” we have looked beyond the horizontal scale of national legislation or litigation to investigate how multi-scalar states craft complex solutions to complex problems. This includes tailoring responses to the specific needs and priorities, pressures and strains, commitments and constraints, that come to fore at the local, regional, national or supra-national level. Multilayered responses to squatting allow scope for normative hybridity within state responses to “wicked” property problems, in ways that can support systemic equilibrium. In the first part of this chapter, we reflect on three types of state responses to squatting: (1) property/private law responses; (2) criminal justice/law-and-order responses; and (3) responses deploying other administrative functions of the state. We consider how state responses reflect alignments between state self-interest and selected aspects of the state’s other-regarding responsibilities; and how they contribute (or not) to restoring equilibrium and shoring up the authority and legitimacy of the state in moments of crisis. These national-jurisdiction level legal responses are embedded within a polycentric, multimodal, and multi-scalar matrix. In the second part of the chapter, we examine two city-level case studies: New York City and Barcelona – to reflect on moments in which local- or city-level responses were key to restoring equilibrium, or triggering tipping-points for change.

Using historical, ethnographic, and archival research, this chapter examines the intersection of environmental policies and community well-being through the lens of community psychology, particularly its attention to the entwinement of socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Focusing on the Gowanus community in Brooklyn, New York, which is midway through a federally mandated environmental cleanup as a Superfund site, we describe how advancing the collective well-being at the scale of the neighborhood can also entail challenging entrenched power structures that have supported systemic inequalities and working within a diverse group. The collective efforts of the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group illustrate how chronic toxic environmental degradation can be addressed within an extended collaborative process. We conclude that while endeavoring to improve the surrounding physical environment, the Group’s efforts have also strengthened collaborative engagement across groups to foster community well-being and social justice.

Integrity in government is one of the most important preconditions for progress towards a low-carbon future. It is founded in the public trust principle according to which all public officers – politicians and public servants – are entrusted with putting the public interest ahead of other interests. Climate is a public interest, held in common. Corruption threatens the integrity of any system of government, undermining local, national and global action on climate change. The risks are not only from the most egregious corruption such as accepting illegal benefits coincident with making decisions favouring donors, but across a spectrum extending to subtle flouting of the public trust principle. Evidence of the risks to a healthy climate posed by corruption are illustrated by the environmental performance of corrupt states, buying influence and votes in democracies and procurement practices that defy government obligations under Paris Climate Change Agreement commitments. Strategies are outlined that can be implemented by nations to honour their Paris Agreement commitments and proactively reduce risks of corruption which undermine action on climate change.