Advancing the emerging field of comparative climate governance and policymaking, this book explores national loss and damage policymaking through seven empirically grounded studies of loss and damage governance across vulnerable countries in the Global South. The introductory chapter sets the scene by presenting the key themes, research questions, and contributions of the book. Following an introduction to the concept of loss and damage from climate change impacts and its emergence at the international level, the chapter argues for a political science of loss and damage that is sensitive to the “national turn” in research on loss and damage governance. The chapter then presents the seven country case studies featured in the book including Small Island Developing States, least developed countries, and emerging economies: Tuvalu, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Peru, and Chile. The case studies show variation in the way countries engage with loss and damage, highlighting the importance of national contexts in understanding the success and/or failure of policymaking. The chapter concludes with a summary of key themes and findings emerging from the case studies and discusses ways in which they advance our understanding of climate policy.

Digital and environmental policies are increasingly seen as complementary, both domestically and internationally. In international trade policy, digital and environmental issues have been and continue to be discussed in multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organisation and in plurilateral negotiations on preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This chapter takes a closer look at the design and impact of digital and environmental provisions in Latin American PTAs. It begins with a brief comparative overview of domestic digital and environmental policies in Latin America, followed by a discussion of the design features of Latin American PTAs. The final section provides an empirical analysis of the impact of these design features on trade. While there is considerable heterogeneity across Latin American countries and PTAs, the analysis suggests a positive relationship between digital and environmental policies. Latin American countries with more ambitious domestic digital policies tend to have more ambitious domestic environmental policies, and vice versa. Similarly, Latin American countries with a broader coverage of digital issues in their PTAs also tend to cover a broader range of environmental issues in their PTAs, and vice versa. The empirical results suggest that the presence and design of digital and environmental provisions in Latin American PTAs have no statistically significant impact on the volume and composition of imports. For exports, the analysis suggests that digital provisions in PTAs tend to increase flows, while the opposite is true for environmental provisions.

By way of recognizing the considerable scholarship that makes the Balkans the best-studied and best-understood sprachbund (contact area), and by way of establishing a baseline of knowledge about the Balkans from a linguistic perspective, Balkan linguistics as a field is surveyed here from an historical perspective, with key scholars and their important works highlighted. Attention is given to pre-modern treatments and to the early modern era of Balkan linguistics, with a particular focus on a watershed moment for the field, the publication of Kristian Sandfeld’s Linguistique Balkanique (1930) and the very rich work done in the modern era after Sandfeld. Meta-questions such as which groups to include in discussions of Balkan linguistics and the relation of the Balkans to (Western) Europe are addressed as well.

Important developments are currently affecting the global trading system. We witness increasing calls for protectionism and a surge in populism in some major economies, while other trading nations continue to liberalise trade, driven by the dynamics of global value chains (GVCs). Even committed trading nations have shown an increased willingness to use industrial policies and have elevated the pursuit of geopolitical concerns through trade. On top of this, calls have increased to tackle the climate crisis through trade policy instruments. In short, important shifts induced by politics and economics shape today’s trade policies.

Chapter 6 treats Balkan convergence involving morphology and morphosyntax more generally, focusing particularly on inflectional morphology. Attention is given to categories and to forms, as well as the special, and often nuanced, functions and semantic range of particular items. Convergence involving nouns and noun phrases is documented, with regard to case, deixis, definiteness, gender, number, and adjectival modification. Particular attention is given to the development of analytic structures. Regarding verbs and verb phrases, convergence is discussed in the categories of tense, aspect, mood, evidential marking, voice, and valency.

In this first full chapter readers will find a general survey of those aspects of Balkan geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic history that are most relevant for the present study, including the Balkans in relation to the Ottoman Empire. We locate the Balkans geographically, describing its physical characteristics and discussing the controversy over where its northern limits are to be located. Various other extralinguistic factors are discussed that are relevant for the linguistic situation. Most importantly, the languages of the Balkans are introduced as to their genealogical affiliation, their historical attestation, their documentation, their pertinent representation in scholarly literature, their dialectology, their social setting, and related matters, including associated writing systems. For the sake of completeness, all languages found in the Balkans, from ancient to early modern, are given some attention, creating a comprehensive account of the geographically determined languages of the Balkans; ultimately, though, the focus is narrowed to the Balkan languages, i.e. those languages in the region that significantly (or in any attested fashion) display the morphosyntactic and other convergence phenomena that are central to the concept of a contact area, i.e. to a sprachbund.

This final chapter, Chapter 8, offers a summation of the major trends of development seen in the preceding chapters, and addresses the key question of causation, looking at the forces that led to the convergence seen across the Balkan languages. Multilateral, multigenerational, mutual, multilingualism (our “four-M” model) is argued to be the leading element in the convergence, with particular focus on the speaker-plus-dialect approach. An assessment of the construct of “sprachbund” is offered, and it is argued that the Balkan sprachbund is not a remnant of an historical state that no longer exists, but rather is very much alive, albeit in more limited contexts than in the past.