The risk society thesis by Ulrich Beck has been one of the more extensively discussed frameworks in environmental management. This paper tries to give an overview over Beck’s extant and fragmented work and ventures to identify the main contributions and implications. It starts with a discussion of the background and principles of Beck’s work and identifies the core ideas as well as the theoreti...

A growing body of literature suggests that political factors are one of the major causes of environmental damage in developing countries endowed with a relative abundance of renewable resources. This has prompted calls for the use of trade sanctions to encourage sustainable resource management practices in these countries. This paper develops a model to assess the interaction between political ...

During economic transition, firms must dramatically reduce their financial dependence on the state and begin to borrow from nonstate capital sources. This paper draws on institutional and resource dependence theories to examine this fundamental transformation of firm capital structure during China’s transition. I propose that managers borrowed from external sources even when internal funds were...

Received 9 May 2011 Accepted 31 May 201

South Africa has one of the worlds most advanced environmental legal frameworks entrenched with the environmental right to “ecologically sustainable development”. Numerous tools, including environmental impact assessment (EIA), are made available within the legal framework as listed in the National Environmental Management Act (NEMA). EIAs have proven useful tools towards achieving sustainabili...