Activity 4.2 - Environmental Policy Framework

5 Frameworks:

1. Identity— “Who am I?” Relating to values, attitudes, beliefs, age, gender, race, religion and ethnic categories.

2. Power— Gain or leverage power over parties

3. Gain/Loss— Loss and gain on environment

4. Risk— Relating to how individuals respond to the potential risks.

5. Conflict Management— Relating to how people how people make decisions for conflicts.

The first framework of the five is identity. Identity is the most important framework because it’s how we can understand ourselves as an individual. Before a person can go and make changes in the world a person must be able to understand the ideas, and concepts that they themselves are looking to accomplish. Identity can also be closely related to a demographic environment because it is used to describe the type of people that we are as well as identifying others. Lastly after finding your identity and demographic group identifications can be formed from knowing yourself and others.

The second piece of framework would be Power. Power is described as an individual who gains power or leverage through disputes in a party. As you increase your power you are able to create laws and regulations which can help further advance the goals you are looking to achieve. The laws that you create can change people's perspective on nature and the environment in general.

Gain and Loss is the third and next piece of framework that is important. Gain and loss shows people the losses from certain laws or actions and also how they can benefit the environment. People can see the outcomes of certain actions and assess how this made an impact on the environment around them.

Risk which can be one of the most important of the frameworks next to identity because it shows the negative effects on the environment. When new policies and laws are created by the government risks are always bound to happen. Depending on how much of a risk certain policies or laws can create can determine whether it will be passed or not as well as creating problems within a community that has different beliefs from those trying to pass the laws. To evaluate risks, fact finding should be done in order to identify and resolve the risks that are presented.

The last framework is Conflict Management. Conflict management refers to how people or parties will deal with problems that they encounter. Conflict management has many benefits to dealing with risks and problems created, as it can aim to make compromises beneficial to all parties involved, and it provides a way to ease potentially dangerous tensions between involved parties. Conflict management uses many of the concepts that I stated above such as identity, to increase the understanding of how conflicts arise, provide clues on how to solve the problems, and even figure out how they can be avoided or better handled in the future. Learning from this helps appeal to political actions as it considers the "best interest" of the economic market.

Davis, C. B., & Lewicki, R. J. (2003). Environmental conflict resolution: Framing and intractability--an introduction. Environmental Practice, 5(3), 200-206. DAVISandLEWICKI_2003_Environmental_conflict_resolution__Framing.pdf

Bryan, T. (2003). Context in environmental conflicts: Where you stand depends on where you sit. Environmental Practice, 5(3), 256-264. BRYAN_2003_Context_in_environmental_conflict Framing.pdf

Environmental Framing Consortium. (2005). Framing choices.Understanding Environmental Problems. http://www.intractableconflict.org/environmentalframing/framing_choices.shtml