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The purpose of this chapter is to give an interpretation to the limits of Indonesia’s forestry policy through the sustainable development approach analyzing the crossroads between economic development and environmental sustainability. There is an expansion and intensification of industrial plantations such as palm oil, as part of the economic development strategy, which must coexist with ongoing efforts of conservation of forest resources in the pursuit of environmental sustainability, including policies such as the Forest Moratorium.

The study explores the influence of the economic development of the palm oil industry in the environmental sustainability of the Forest Moratorium during the period 2011–2014. A case study on the Forest Moratorium is presented analyzing the operativeness of sustainable development principles in the discourse and concrete actions of this specific policy.

The study evidences that there is a basic problem in Indonesia’s forestry policy and the sustainable development approach, not only because of its inherent contradictions, but also due to the flaws in its interpretation and implementation. It is necessary to rethink the sustainable development, its scopes and limitations, taking into consideration its hybridity, dynamism, and constant transformation. It is also necessary to consider the feasibility of a paradigm shift or a search for sustainable solutions based on other parameters. One way of doing it should include a more participatory approach with a joint work by the government, local communities, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and academia.

First, as this is a case study the findings are not generalizable; and second, the social dimension of sustainable development is not incorporated in its entirety, as this study focuses mainly on the economic and environmental dimensions.

The findings contribute to the discussion in the theoretical and public policy fields, on the crossroads between economic development and environmental sustainability in the international agenda for sustainable development.

The study allows capturing the discussion in a concrete case and learning from the experience of Indonesia, its institutional failures, and the causes of its environmental problems.

This chapter looks at the approaches taken by Malaysian Islamic banks and the central Shariah body in assisting the financial consumers going through the COVID-19 pandemic economic distress in consequence of the Movement Control Order and the socially responsible investing (SRI) opportunity Malaysian government put up through the Sukuk Prihatin in order to rebuild the economy. It is found that through shariah principles of ta'awun (mutual assistance), Islamic finance, and with numerous Islamic jurisprudential approaches under the shariah could provide better solutions to overcome the economic hardship experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper showcases the approaches taken in Malaysia relying on the Islamic finance landscape in overcoming the financial hardship suffered by the financial consumers due to COVID-19 pandemic and in rebuilding the economic through a unique mutual assist opportunity.

Is the death penalty dying? This autobiographical essay offers observations on the application of capital punishment in three very different legal jurisdictions at three different time periods when – partially by happenstance and partially by design – she was a homicide researcher, a participant and an observer of profound changes in the jurisdiction's application of the death penalty.

In the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, the abolition of capital punishment was virtually unthinkable. However, a new form of abolitionism – which I call Rule of Law abolitionism – has raised the hopes of death penalty opponents. In this chapter, I elucidate the logic of the Rule of Law abolitionist argument, distinguishing it from its more familiar doctrinal and moral variants. I then assess its strengths and weaknesses. On the basis of this critique, I indicate the route Rule of Law abolitionism must travel to bring about the demise of the death penalty.

The focus on local-level policy initiatives in US anti-fracking movements presents unique opportunities to explore interactions between professional advocacy organizations with regional/national constituencies and grassroots organizations with constituencies who will directly experience changes in local landscapes resulting from unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD). However, research on anti-fracking movements in the US has considered dynamics of interorganizational cooperation only peripherally. This chapter examines factors that motivate coalition building, sources of coalition fragmentation, and the progressive polarization of grassroots anti-fracking and countermovement activists using qualitative research on an anti-fracking movement in Illinois. While grassroots groups may experience some strategic advantages by collaborating with extra-local, professionalized advocacy organizations, these relationships involve navigating considerable inequalities. In the case presented here, I find that coalition building was important for putting UOGD on the policy agenda. However, when anti-fracking activists began experiencing success, institutionalization rapidly produced fragmentation in the coalition, and a countermovement of UOGD supporters was formed. I highlight how ordinary movement dynamics are particularly susceptible to polarization in the context of local land use disputes that “scale-up” to involve broader movement constituencies as perceptions of distributive injustice collide with perceptions of procedural injustice.

Meta-organizations are crucial devices to tackle grand challenges. Yet, by bringing together different organizations, with potentially diverging views on these grand challenges, meta-organizations need to cope with the emergence of contradictory underlying social orders. Do contradictory orders affect meta-organizations’ ability to govern grand challenges and if so, how? This paper investigates these essential questions by focusing on the evolution and intermeshing of social orders within international governance meta-organizations. Focusing on the International Whaling Commission and the grand challenge of whale conservation, we show how over time incompatible social orders between the meta-organization and its members emerge, evolve and clash. As our study shows, this clash of social orders ultimately removes the “decidability” of certain social orders at the meta-organizational level. We define decidability as the possibility for actors to reach collective decisions about changing an existing social order that falls under a collective’s mandate. We argue that maintaining decidability is a key condition for grand challenges’ governance success while the emergence of “non-decidability” of controversial social orders can lead to substantial failure. We contribute to both the emerging literature on grand challenges and organization theory.

With the debt crisis that has been impacting many countries in the Global South since 2015, its spectacular acceleration following the collateral effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ever-increasing weight of “new” creditors (China, Gulf countries, and private creditors), the old debate for the creation of an international sovereign debt restructuring mechanism under the aegis of the United Nations has resurfaced. Although such a mechanism could constitute a real advance compared to the current situation, it remains very hypothetical, both because of its limits and because of the complexity of the process to be undertaken in view of the adoption of an international treaty endorsing its creation. Above all, it ignores the sovereignty of states and the right to self-determination of peoples. Other solutions exist, which are less complicated, less expensive, and not at all less legitimate, among which the establishment of a moratorium with interest freeze and the creation of an audit committee with citizen participation aiming at canceling or repudiating the illegitimate debts with regard to international law and national legal provisions.

The authors use Agarwal's (1992, 1997) research methodology for analyzing the intersection of gender, poverty and the environment in rural India and apply it to the case of fishing communities in Newfoundland. Here too, environmental degradation, “statization” and privatization of hitherto public resources, as well as technological development, and erosion of community management systems, effect similar adverse consequences on women. In both cases the effects are magnified by a retrenchment of liberal ideology that shrivels state social programs. We find the devaluation of women's fishing knowledge, their decreasing health and general nutrition, and the gendered nature of financial and temporal-spatial stress are associated with these larger trends.

Drawing from televised debates over capital punishment on CNN’s Crossfire from February 2000 to June 2002, I argue that Teles’s (1998) theory of “dissensus politics” is useful in understanding the U.S.’s preservation of capital punishment as well as current divisions in death penalty sentiment within the U.S. I pose the retention of capital punishment as the product of rival elites who are unwilling to forsake capital punishment’s moral character (and often the political benefits it offers), and who consequently ignore an American public that appears to have reached a measured consensus of doubt about the death penalty.