This chapter centers on the 1967–1968 “Swedish initiative” in the United Nations that led to the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. The diplomatic initiative, underpinned by Swedish scientific expertise, and the Stockholm Conference’s four-year preparatory period marked the emergence of environmental diplomacy and global environmental governance, as well as the rise of North–South tensions over environment and development. The chapter also explains how the autumn 1967 environmental awakening in Sweden, prompted in part by a best-selling environmental polemic by biochemist Hans Palmstierna and an exposé on acid rain by soil scientist Svante Odén, set the stage for the UN intervention orchestrated by Swedish diplomats Inga Thorsson and Sverker Åström. Also that year, as examined in this chapter, the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) conference, hosted by the Meteorological Institute at Stockholm University, demonstrated Stockholm’s central place and Bert Bolin’s leading role in the growing international coordination of climate science.

In this chapter, we present the major market failures and behavioural anomalies that are relevant to analyse energy and climate issues from an economic point of view. We start with a discussion on positive and negative externalities; next we discuss the public goods and common resource problem, followed by a presentation of the principal–agent and information problems, and then we provide a summary of the role of lack of competition in energy and energy-related markets. An important aspect described in this chapter is the role of behavioural anomalies, such as bounded rationality and bounded willpower. At the end of the chapter, we describe the most important energy and climate policies as well as the concept of sustainable development that should guide policy design. We also discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.

This chapter explores the Member States’ use of EU private international family law in the protection of children with links abroad from abuse or neglect by their family. These measures include rules governing the assumption of jurisdiction over the parental responsibility of a child, including both private and public law measures. The chapter argues that the abused and neglected child was not a central focus when regulating the cross-border family and, as a consequence, legal borders between Member States’ family law systems retain considerable significance for these children. Whilst each Member State has provision in place for public law child protection measures, the methods and approach adopted vary significantly between legal systems, as do the potential substantive outcomes for children. The EU’s private international family law rules are designed to obscure these differences and this has presented difficulties in supporting cross-national cooperation over child protection. The political nature of these decisions has meant that focus on the welfare of the child may consequently be lost.

In this chapter, we first explain what energy economics is and what energy and climate policy mean. We then describe the advantages of energy for society, and the current energy systems and their environmental and economic problems. At the end of the chapter, we discuss the energy transition and the characteristics of the energy systems once the transition has taken place. In the discussions in this chapter, we make note of developing countries.

In this chapter, we first provide a general overview of energy and climate policy goals and their main instruments. We underline the common goals between energy and climate policy, as well as possible conflicts in objectives. In the next part, we illustrate monetary market-based instruments such as pollution taxes, product taxes, and energy taxes, as well as subsidies and pollution permit trading systems. We also discuss, using figures, the implications of behavioural anomalies on the effectiveness of these types of policy instruments. At the end of the chapter, we introduce non-monetary market-based instruments, giving some weight to nudges. At the end of the chapter, we discuss issues in developing countries related to the topics discussed in the chapter.

This chapter tells the story of how a small Stockholm-based team of researchers developed concepts and ideas from a maturing Earth system science into the policy-relevant Planetary Boundaries (PB) framework, thus contributing seminally to an emerging twenty-first century sustainability-focused worldview. Prepared in gradually widening interdisciplinary discussions, including at the 2007 Tällberg Forum where many of the 29 co-authors convened, the first PB article was published in Nature in 2009. It presented critical boundaries for nine Earth System properties that were either already transgressed or threatening to be transgressed in the near future through anthropogenic impact. The chapter investigates the roots of the arguments and lines of thought behind the framework. It also compares the PB framework and thinking with the line of work pursued by the Club of Rome-commissioned Limits to Growth report in 1972, and argues that while Limits to Growth (LTG) stressed the finite nature of resources, the PB framework focused on the overall planetary effects of the expanding human enterprise. This allows in more dynamic ways for human and societal creativity to deal with challenges while staying inside the boundaries.

In this chapter I consider two controversies over the taxation of urban land at the twilight of Ecuador’s Citizen’s Revolution. The first is the campaign by the Pueblo Kitu Kara, an organisation representing Indigenous peoples in Quito, for recognition of communal property and territory, together with its constitutionally guaranteed freedom from taxation. The second was a highly controversial (and short-lived) tax on capital gains from real estate, promoted by the post-neoliberal president Rafael Correa as a counter to speculation, corruption, and unearned gains from the land market. Taken together, these conflicts illustrate the historically limited reach of hegemonic processes of state formation in Ecuador, and how those limits also open up opportunities for introducing and (sometimes) sustaining institutions distinct from the normative forms of the capitalist state, even as they present marked political challenges for transformative state projects. The trajectory of both controversies also highlights the contradictions and dangers of a top-down and technocratic approach to social and economic transformation in a polity shaped by profound inequalities of class and coloniality.