What’s emerging from your interviews with experts in South Tyrol?
Rebecca Nelson: One of the major themes is coordination. And being here is an excellent context for thinking about that. There's inter-provincial coordination between Tyrol in Austria and South Tyrol, as well as the province and municipalities, the province and the national government, and then the Alpine Convention over the top of everything, plus lots of European directives. I think the fact that South Tyrol’s an autonomous province adds a really nice twist. Particularly that there's cultural difference between the German-speaking and the Italian-speaking populations, and that there's this cultural connection between the German-speaking population and mountain grazing. It means that the issue is perhaps more prominent than it would be in some other regions, there are all these really unique legal mechanisms to deal with it, that are intertwining the environment and culture in a really interesting way. It's great to have those intersections actually and be able to connect with people who are looking at all those different perspectives in one place.
In your book chapter, you talk about cities as being protagonists: environmental villains and victims.
Rebecca Nelson: The characters of the city as villain and city as victim are not intended to relate to any specific city. It's generalized, we see cities that occupy these positions in various ways, usually as a mixture of the two, of both villain and victim. But a villain city, as a stereotype, is a city that causes environmental damage outside of its boundaries, in the way that it gets resources for the city. So, for example, water resources that require dams to be built outside of a city or energy facilities that are located outside of a city but may pollute another area for the benefit of the city's residents.
And then within the city itself, around the world, and I think this rings true for many people, there are differences in the level of environmental health and environmental justice experienced by citizens in different parts of the city. People talk about there being a democratic deficit in terms of the people who are most vulnerable and who carry the greatest cumulative environmental burden, not having as much of a voice in political decision-making at the city level. A villain city is one that doesn't try to correct that democratic deficit, as well as causing environmental externalities outside of its boundaries.
The city as victim is really pointing to the fact that cities suffer from environmental problems that are caused outside their boundaries as well. So, cities, especially coastal cities, are very vulnerable to climate change which of course is caused by global activities, cumulative emissions emitted globally and because of this, it's very expensive for cities to think about ways to respond to climate change or to even understand the problem.