James Patterson
Biographic Data
| ID | 650255 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Patterson |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Patterson |
| SIGNATURE | PATTERSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4849-7613 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 482 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Navigating the eye of the storm: Policy conflict and bureaucratic policymaking in Australia and Canada
Bureaucrats play an inherently political role in policymaking, particularly in domains like climate change, where policies may face sociopolitical backlash imposing unusually high pressure on policymaking. Yet, it is unclear exactly how bureaucrats respond to backlash, and whether and how they find new ways to exert policymaking influence despite broader policy conflict. We examine how bureaucrats respond to climate policy backlash by developing …
The changing geographies of renewable energy: Accumulation, saturation, and contestation in Dunkirk, France
Renewable energy technology (RET) is expanding into new territories. Technological change, increasing demand, and siting constraints increasingly lead to RET development in already urbanized or industrialized landscapes. Here, the infrastructural context could make RET less visible and/or disruptive, but it could also exacerbate existing problems (e.g., environmental degradation) and create new social conflicts over the uneven impacts of energy t…
Tenuous (in)stability? Mixed policy feedback and its effects on climate policy in Australia and Canada
Policy feedback is often viewed as either reinforcing or undermining policy stability. However, it can arise in multiple ways simultaneously, creating mixed policy feedback with complex effects on policy stability. We examine how mixed policy feedback affects policy stability by developing a framework to identify within- and across-level feedbacks, and applying it to two cases of contested climate policy involving domestic carbon markets in Austr…
Agency and values for transformative change
Finding the way: The situated practice of forging alternative energy futures in two former European coalmining communities
Former coalmining communities are often portrayed as regressive and/or resistant to change due to deep dependence on carbon-intensive systems. Emerging research highlights the (latent) potential of post-coal affordances as endogenous social or material features that can create new political possibilities for such communities. However, affordances do not always translate into action, and post-coal transitions within and across Europe exhibit mixed…
Roadblocks of polarization: Interpretive mechanisms of opposition to a speed limit policy on German highways
Social polarization can generate opposition to climate policy action but how exactly this occurs is often assumed rather than explicated. Unpacking this influence is important for understanding why oppositional responses to climate policy arise among mass publics. We analyze interpretive mechanisms by which social polarization leads to policy opposition in response to a proposed speed limit on highways in Germany. We employ an abductive process-t…
J. D. Vance et les postlibéraux catholiques: Continuateurs d’une lignée de naufrages
What’s the problem? Unpacking the problem-complex of coal extraction and climate action in Whitehaven, UK
We explore why and how problems related to climate action emerge in specific, sometimes peripheral, places. Diverse forms of socio-political contestation over both fossil fuels and low-carbon shifts imply that the problems that climate policy is positioned against are neither singular nor self-evident. Climate action intersects with complex socio-material settings, which can produce new problems and amplify or refract existing ones (e.g. job loss…
Reactions to policy action: Socio-Political Conditions of Backlash to Climate Change Policy
Public policymaking on issues requiring ambitious yet socially and economically costly action can face backlash from target groups and wider audiences, threatening policy adoption and durability. As an abrupt negative reaction to policy action, backlash is challenging to study and requires distinctive analytical approaches. This is especially pressing for climate change mitigation policy, which faces growing yet dispersed empirical experiences of…
Embracing the politics of transformation: "Policy action as "battle-settlement events
Societal transformations for addressing climate change are intensely contested and at risk of resistance and backlash to ambitious policy action. But they are frequently modeled through heuristics such as S-curves which abstract from such conflicts, assuming increasing returns to scale as a driver of transformations. This is the case even while scholars accept the presence of political conflict in transformation processes. Within political scienc…
Refining medical clearance protocol for patients with primary psychiatric complaints in the emergency department
Our results support the recommended guidelines set by AAEP for laboratory testing in addition to history, vital signs and physical examination prior to medical clearance. Certain laboratory testing such as CK and CMP were identified to have higher utility for medical intervention while other lab work such as UA and UDS had less of an impact. Further, we suggest that specifically a CK and CMP be obtained on patients presenting with any of the foll…
Pluralizing Debates on the Anthropocene Requires Engaging with the Diversity of Existing Scholarship
A recent article in this journal (Jackson 2021 Jackson, M. 2021. On decolonizing the Anthropocene: Disobedience via plural constitutions. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 (3):698–708. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) validly emphasized that debates about the Anthropocene need to recognize a diverse range of perspectives, worldviews, and forms of knowledge. In…
Untitled James Patterson Thriller
Culture and identity in climate policy
Culture and (collective) identity need to become more central in thinking about how ambitious climate policy for decarbonization can be enacted within domestic (i.e., national, subnational) politics. Policy attention has long centered on material costs and benefits of action, including distributions of costs/benefits between different actors and over time. The challenge of reconciling concentrated short-term costs to specific actors and groups wi…
Backlash to Climate Policy
Hard climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phaseouts) is needed to meet ambitious climate targets, but when such policy is introduced, it can sometimes trigger backlash. Backlash involves an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a significant number of actors seeking to reverse a policy, often through extraordinary means that transgress established procedures and norms. Yet, explanations of policy backlash remain nascent and fragmen…
Compound urban crises
The crises that cities face—such as climate change, pandemics, economic downturn, and racism—are tightly interlinked and cannot be addressed in isolation. This paper addresses compound urban crises as a unique type of problem, in which discrete solutions that tackle each crisis independently are insufficient. Few scholarly debates address compound urban crises and there is, to date, a lack of interdisciplinary insights to inform urban governance …
Catholic Republicanism in America
Recently, so-called Catholic “postliberal” conservatives have condemned the American regime as fundamentally liberal and, hence, parasitic on pre-liberal institutions. I argue that this view unduly conflates liberalism and republicanism and thereby confuses an ideology with the principles of the regime. American Catholic clergy have historically condemned liberalism in favor of a Catholic republicanism. This trend began with the political thought…
Subaltern forms of knowledge are required to boost local adaptation
The political effects of emergency frames in sustainability
Commentary: Transformative Change in Governance Systems
More than planning: Diversity and drivers of institutional adaptation under climate change in 96 major cities
A key challenge for effective, ongoing urban climate adaptation is to adapt institutions within urban governance. While an extensive foundation of empirical knowledge on urban climate adaptation has accumulated over the last decade, our image of institutional adaptation continues to be dominated by a focus on planning. Whilst understandable, this can obscure a fuller range of areas in which institutional adaptation to climate change is being purs…
Remaking political institutions in sustainability transitions
Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there
Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge sy…
Remaking Political Institutions: Climate Change and Beyond
Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems is not straightforward. Pursuing institutional improvement is an intensely political process, playing out over extended timeframes, and intricately tied to existing setups. Such activities are open-ended, and outcomes are often provisional and indeterminate. The question of institutional improvement, theref…
City Profile: Porto
Notebook CITY PROFILE Porto by James Patterson GRIPPING THE STEEP BANKS of the Douro like a pile of haphazardly shoveled rocks, the city of Porto feels only one pebble’s slip away from tumbling into the olivine waters of the river below. When the cobbled streets surge with rolling rainwater, such an event feels unavoidable. In the five years I’ve been visiting Porto, I’ve always been met with inordinately good weather. Even now, as I write in typ…
Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability
The notion of 'transformations towards sustainability' takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance and politics aspects of transformations remain arguably under-developed in the global sustainability…
New directions in earth system governance research
The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant a…
Ten essentials for action-oriented and second order energy transitions, transformations and climate change research
The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guiding action-oriented transformation and energy research are therefore presented, framed in relation to…
Backlash to Climate Policy
Hard climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phaseouts) is needed to meet ambitious climate targets, but when such policy is introduced, it can sometimes trigger backlash. Backlash involves an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a significant number of actors seeking to reverse a policy, often through extraordinary means that transgress established procedures and norms. Yet, explanations of policy backlash remain nascent and fragmen…
Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there
Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge sy…
Political feasibility of 1.5°C societal transformations: The role of social justice
Constraining global climate change to 1.5°C is commonly understood to require urgent and deep societal transformations. Yet such transformations are not always viewed as politically feasible; finding ways to enhance the political feasibility of ambitious decarbonization trajectories is needed. This paper reviews the role of social justice as an organizing principle for politically feasible 1.5°C transformations. A social justice lens usefully foc…
Remaking political institutions in sustainability transitions
More than planning: Diversity and drivers of institutional adaptation under climate change in 96 major cities
A key challenge for effective, ongoing urban climate adaptation is to adapt institutions within urban governance. While an extensive foundation of empirical knowledge on urban climate adaptation has accumulated over the last decade, our image of institutional adaptation continues to be dominated by a focus on planning. Whilst understandable, this can obscure a fuller range of areas in which institutional adaptation to climate change is being purs…
The political effects of emergency frames in sustainability
Embracing the politics of transformation: "Policy action as "battle-settlement events
Societal transformations for addressing climate change are intensely contested and at risk of resistance and backlash to ambitious policy action. But they are frequently modeled through heuristics such as S-curves which abstract from such conflicts, assuming increasing returns to scale as a driver of transformations. This is the case even while scholars accept the presence of political conflict in transformation processes. Within political scienc…
Governing for resilience: The role of institutional work
Compound urban crises
The crises that cities face—such as climate change, pandemics, economic downturn, and racism—are tightly interlinked and cannot be addressed in isolation. This paper addresses compound urban crises as a unique type of problem, in which discrete solutions that tackle each crisis independently are insufficient. Few scholarly debates address compound urban crises and there is, to date, a lack of interdisciplinary insights to inform urban governance …
Remaking Political Institutions: Climate Change and Beyond
Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems is not straightforward. Pursuing institutional improvement is an intensely political process, playing out over extended timeframes, and intricately tied to existing setups. Such activities are open-ended, and outcomes are often provisional and indeterminate. The question of institutional improvement, theref…
Implementing the “Sustainable Development Goals”: Towards addressing three key governance challenges—collective action, trade-offs, and accountability
Culture and identity in climate policy
Culture and (collective) identity need to become more central in thinking about how ambitious climate policy for decarbonization can be enacted within domestic (i.e., national, subnational) politics. Policy attention has long centered on material costs and benefits of action, including distributions of costs/benefits between different actors and over time. The challenge of reconciling concentrated short-term costs to specific actors and groups wi…
Police filming English streets in 1935: The limits of mediated identification
This article considers and early example of technologically-mediated visual surveillance: the use of cine cameras by the British police in 1935 in the English town of Chesterfield in an operation to crack down on illegal street betting. The paper argues that the operation and its consequences in the judicial system illustrate a number of issues: unreliable policing on the ground; the enthusiasm for technological approaches to crime; and the limit…
Commentary: Transformative Change in Governance Systems
Purposeful collective action in ambiguous and contested situations: Exploring ‘enabling capacities’ and cross-level interplay
Purposeful collective action is important for sustainably managing many kinds of natural resource issues in social-ecological systems. However, cultivating purposeful collective action is challenging in ambiguous and contested situations involving multiple issues, actors, levels, and drivers, and weak or missing feedback. A particular example is the problem of managing waterway health in large and diverse landscapes. This paper analyses the emerg…
Exploring Local Responses to a Wicked Problem: Context, Collective Action, and Outcomes in Catchments in Subtropical Australia
Generating effective local responses to natural resource management problems within multilevel resource governance systems is a major challenge. This challenge is highlighted for the “wicked problem” of managing non-point-source pollution, which is increasingly urgent globally for the sustainability of natural water systems. The article explores how local responses to this problem arose in a case study in South East Queensland, Australia. It indu…
Reactions to policy action: Socio-Political Conditions of Backlash to Climate Change Policy
Public policymaking on issues requiring ambitious yet socially and economically costly action can face backlash from target groups and wider audiences, threatening policy adoption and durability. As an abrupt negative reaction to policy action, backlash is challenging to study and requires distinctive analytical approaches. This is especially pressing for climate change mitigation policy, which faces growing yet dispersed empirical experiences of…
Catholic Republicanism in America
Recently, so-called Catholic “postliberal” conservatives have condemned the American regime as fundamentally liberal and, hence, parasitic on pre-liberal institutions. I argue that this view unduly conflates liberalism and republicanism and thereby confuses an ideology with the principles of the regime. American Catholic clergy have historically condemned liberalism in favor of a Catholic republicanism. This trend began with the political thought…
The Unassimilated Greeks of Denver
The Greek community in Denver began around the turn of the century. As it grew and prospered, the majority of its members moved out of the original Greek Town and today there is only one Greek coffee house left in the area. This kafeneion serves the remaining 40-50 unassimilated old men and the few younger new arrivals. The old men have been largely unsuccessful financially, maintain strong emotional orientation toward Greece, are ambivalent towa…
Problems in Social Studies Instruction in Thai High Schools
The Unassimilated Greeks of Denver
The Greek community in Denver began around the turn of the century. As it grew and prospered, the majority of its members moved out of the original Greek Town and today there is only one Greek coffee house left in the area. This kafeneion serves the remaining 40-50 unassimilated old men and the few younger new arrivals. The old men have been largely unsuccessful financially, maintain strong emotional orientation toward Greece, are ambivalent towa…
Anthropological Research in Romania, 1970-71
Affinity strategies in relation‐ships: The role of gender and imagined interactions in maintaining liking among College roommates
Affinity‐seeking behavior among College roommates was examined to investigate how individuals sustain the relationship. Planning for affinity maintenance was examined in terms of covert dialogues based on the literature on imagined interactions (Ils) in which individuals rehearse anticipated encounters while reviewing prior conversations. A series of hypotheses and research questions were posed examining gender and self‐talk with roommates in ter…
The Water Journey
Police filming English streets in 1935: The limits of mediated identification
This article considers and early example of technologically-mediated visual surveillance: the use of cine cameras by the British police in 1935 in the English town of Chesterfield in an operation to crack down on illegal street betting. The paper argues that the operation and its consequences in the judicial system illustrate a number of issues: unreliable policing on the ground; the enthusiasm for technological approaches to crime; and the limit…
Exploring Local Responses to a Wicked Problem: Context, Collective Action, and Outcomes in Catchments in Subtropical Australia
Generating effective local responses to natural resource management problems within multilevel resource governance systems is a major challenge. This challenge is highlighted for the “wicked problem” of managing non-point-source pollution, which is increasingly urgent globally for the sustainability of natural water systems. The article explores how local responses to this problem arose in a case study in South East Queensland, Australia. It indu…
Exploring the governance and politics of transformations towards sustainability
The notion of 'transformations towards sustainability' takes an increasingly central position in global sustainability research and policy discourse in recent years. Governance and politics are central to understanding and analysing transformations towards sustainability. However, despite receiving growing attention in recent years, the governance and politics aspects of transformations remain arguably under-developed in the global sustainability…
Ten essentials for action-oriented and second order energy transitions, transformations and climate change research
The most critical question for climate research is no longer about the problem, but about how to facilitate the transformative changes necessary to avoid catastrophic climate-induced change. Addressing this question, however, will require massive upscaling of research that can rapidly enhance learning about transformations. Ten essentials for guiding action-oriented transformation and energy research are therefore presented, framed in relation to…
Governing for resilience: The role of institutional work
Political feasibility of 1.5°C societal transformations: The role of social justice
Constraining global climate change to 1.5°C is commonly understood to require urgent and deep societal transformations. Yet such transformations are not always viewed as politically feasible; finding ways to enhance the political feasibility of ambitious decarbonization trajectories is needed. This paper reviews the role of social justice as an organizing principle for politically feasible 1.5°C transformations. A social justice lens usefully foc…
Implementing the “Sustainable Development Goals”: Towards addressing three key governance challenges—collective action, trade-offs, and accountability
Purposeful collective action in ambiguous and contested situations: Exploring ‘enabling capacities’ and cross-level interplay
Purposeful collective action is important for sustainably managing many kinds of natural resource issues in social-ecological systems. However, cultivating purposeful collective action is challenging in ambiguous and contested situations involving multiple issues, actors, levels, and drivers, and weak or missing feedback. A particular example is the problem of managing waterway health in large and diverse landscapes. This paper analyses the emerg…
New directions in earth system governance research
The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant a…
Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there
Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge sy…
Remaking Political Institutions: Climate Change and Beyond
Institutions are failing in many areas of contemporary politics, not least of which concerns climate change. However, remedying such problems is not straightforward. Pursuing institutional improvement is an intensely political process, playing out over extended timeframes, and intricately tied to existing setups. Such activities are open-ended, and outcomes are often provisional and indeterminate. The question of institutional improvement, theref…
City Profile: Porto
Notebook CITY PROFILE Porto by James Patterson GRIPPING THE STEEP BANKS of the Douro like a pile of haphazardly shoveled rocks, the city of Porto feels only one pebble’s slip away from tumbling into the olivine waters of the river below. When the cobbled streets surge with rolling rainwater, such an event feels unavoidable. In the five years I’ve been visiting Porto, I’ve always been met with inordinately good weather. Even now, as I write in typ…
Subaltern forms of knowledge are required to boost local adaptation
The political effects of emergency frames in sustainability
Commentary: Transformative Change in Governance Systems
More than planning: Diversity and drivers of institutional adaptation under climate change in 96 major cities
A key challenge for effective, ongoing urban climate adaptation is to adapt institutions within urban governance. While an extensive foundation of empirical knowledge on urban climate adaptation has accumulated over the last decade, our image of institutional adaptation continues to be dominated by a focus on planning. Whilst understandable, this can obscure a fuller range of areas in which institutional adaptation to climate change is being purs…
Remaking political institutions in sustainability transitions
Untitled James Patterson Thriller
Culture and identity in climate policy
Culture and (collective) identity need to become more central in thinking about how ambitious climate policy for decarbonization can be enacted within domestic (i.e., national, subnational) politics. Policy attention has long centered on material costs and benefits of action, including distributions of costs/benefits between different actors and over time. The challenge of reconciling concentrated short-term costs to specific actors and groups wi…
Backlash to Climate Policy
Hard climate policy (e.g., regulation, taxes/pricing, phaseouts) is needed to meet ambitious climate targets, but when such policy is introduced, it can sometimes trigger backlash. Backlash involves an abrupt and forceful negative reaction by a significant number of actors seeking to reverse a policy, often through extraordinary means that transgress established procedures and norms. Yet, explanations of policy backlash remain nascent and fragmen…
Sustainability and Climate Change Governance (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Politics (14 works) · Economics (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Action (physics (8 works) · Ecology (8 works)