Hello everybody:
Happy new year. I hope 2018 brings better news on environmental policy and
climate change issues than 2017.
Here is a follow-up (short) piece on Amazon HQ2 and climate change: "Information-Based Regulation and the
Search for Amazon’s Second Headquarters."
Information-based management such as rating/ranking systems have emerged as an important governance tool across issue areas. In these systems, the rater not only collects information but also interprets it in a user-friendly format.
This format allows stakeholders to name and shame the rated actors. Examples of such rankings systems include Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the World Bank’s Index of Ease of Doing Business, US News’s National
University Rankings, and so on.
But such systems also have problems, as the literature on commensuration
suggests. We highlight these problems with Amazon HQ2 city-level rankings as an
illustrative example:
https://www.theregreview.org/2017/12/19/dolsak-prakash-information-based-regulation-amazons-second-headquarters/
Our hope for 2018 and beyond is that all companies, including Amazon, will
systematically and explicitly incorporate climate change dimensions in their
business decisions, including decisions about locating their new facilities and
factories.
Best,
Aseem
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Aseem Prakash
Professor, Department of Political Science
Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences
Founding Director, UW Center for Environmental Politics
39 Gowen Hall, Box 353530
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3530
http://faculty.washington.edu/aseem/
http://depts.washington.edu/envirpol/
