The editors open with a deceptively simple premise: visualizations have always belonged to geography. A science whose original meaning is the description and naming of the Earth has never operated without visual media, whether maps, plans or illustrations. Quantitative image processing, particularly the analysis of satellite imagery in remote sensing, has a long institutional tradition. What has been missing, the editors contend, is a systematic overview of how visualization functions in qualitative research, where images serve not only as empirical material but also as tools for structuring data and communicating findings. The handbook grew out of a research network funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) dedicated to exactly this question.

Conceptually, the book positions itself firmly in the tradition of the linguistic turn and the subsequent critique of representation. Following that logic, a map or an image does not depict the world; it brings the world into being alongside other practices, though under rules and preconditions that differ from those governing texts. The editors describe visualizing as less an act of reproduction than a creative act, a form of world-making. Seeing and making visible, they argue, and the ordering of gazes, extend far beyond the biological act of vision and are embedded in structures of power. This framing sets the stage for a research process in which every visual choice, from the delineation of a study area on a map to the framing of a photograph, carries assumptions that demand reflection.

Structurally, the handbook is organized along the chronology of a research process, divided into seven chapters. It opens with an introduction containing short empirical vignettes, then moves through the theoretical lens researchers bring to their work, formal questions that arise before fieldwork begins, the diverse empirical tools used during research, and finally the communication of results and a reflection on the book project itself. The vignettes that frame the volume appear first in abbreviated form, serve as recurring references throughout, and return at the end in fully elaborated versions. The reviewer notes that this two-tiered presentation of the vignettes proved confusing rather than illuminating, one of the few structural missteps in an otherwise inviting design that supports both casual browsing and targeted searching.

The first substantive section, titled WOHER, interrogates the theoretical perspective from which researchers view their subject. Tilo Felgenhauer distinguishes three forms of visual knowledge in geography: cartographic-positivist visualization as technical knowledge, media analysis and deconstruction as critical knowledge, and the visualization of individual spatial images as participatory-reflexive knowledge. The historical arc he traces is striking. For centuries, progress in cartography was understood as an ever more accurate and correct representation of spatial reality, a supposedly objective depiction of space. Yet even a simple map template, with its drawn boundaries and chosen extent, produces space rather than merely recording it. Katharina Schmidt and Katrin Singer sharpen the point through an analysis of colonial photography, showing that such images reflected the imaginations of the photographers, shaped by discourse, far more than any external reality, and asking who holds the power to depict at all.

The chapter VORHER addresses what must be considered before data collection or visual presentation begins. Francis Harvey emphasizes clarifying the role of existing visualizations: who created them and with what intention, and whether they may legally be used at all. Cosima Werner examines copyright and data protection, while Carolin Genz presses the reflexive questions further, asking what interests lie behind the use of visual data and what power effects may arise when minorities are the subject of research. Genz proposes reflexive strategies for embedding ethical considerations into the research process when visual methods are deployed. Stella Schäfer closes the section by advocating reflection in the sense of situated knowledge, showing how techniques such as bodymapping can give researchers access to their own emotions and affections during fieldwork.

The central chapter, DABEI, reveals the breadth of what visual geographies can encompass: maps, bodies, drawings, plans, AI-generated images, films and photographs. Nora Küttel and Kristine Beurskens treat photographs as active tools of knowledge production and communication. Elisabeth Sommerland and Paul Hummel reframe filmmaking as a scientific practice in its own right, in which the finished film is the result of interaction with the research object, simultaneously method and communication. Verena Schröder shows that working with drawings is less about artistic competence than about accessing data that language alone cannot capture. Janina Dobrusskin and Lea Bauer demonstrate how collaborative mapping can strengthen the multiplicity of positioned perspectives and increase the visibility of grievances. Anke Strüver and Fabian Pettig contribute a vivid empirical example: a mapping exercise starting from the researcher’s own body produced a reversal of north and south, explicable only through embodied everyday experience. Ajith Singh and Kathrin Meißner turn to urban planning visions, examining the affective imagery of activist initiatives that seek to redefine the politics of planning.

Perhaps the most timely contribution comes from Boris Michel, who tackles research with artificial intelligence. AI can produce impressive visualizations, but the handbook insists these do not simply appear out of thin air, as the popular term hallucinating suggests. Rather, they are generated by socio-technical systems that produce plausible outputs on the basis of vast datasets, computing power and human classification labor. Such systems are entangled with the political economies of AI companies and with decades of classification and stereotyping embedded in visual data. The chapter on communication, DANACH, extends this critical stance to infographics and film. Frank Meyer warns that infographics, while offering accessible preparation of scientific content, risk being used as a substitute for text, forcing qualitative researchers to reduce complexity while preserving the strengths of their approach. Yannick Noah Layer stresses that filmic communication must always clarify how, what, for whom and with what goal content is prepared, given film’s capacity to deliberately evoke emotion.

The final chapter, WOHIN, looks to the future. Kimberly Coulter examines discovery interfaces, from streaming platforms to art archives, showing how these digital gatekeepers select, categorize, evaluate, limit and steer in the service of particular interests while other perspectives are excluded, and how geolocation can both empower and endanger people. Mirka Winkel and Jeannine Wintzer chart future possibilities instead, proposing dialogic encounters between science and the public built on aesthetic design that relates people and their knowledge systems to one another. An empirical example of an urban square redesigned against heat shows how open, aesthetically shaped exchange spaces can strengthen acceptance of transformative projects. Four of the editors report on a choreographic spatial exploration in which unusual bodily positions, such as hanging upside down on a playground, interrupt habitual patterns of thought, demanding the courage to start from radical not-knowing.

The verdict of the review is nuanced. The book is aimed at researchers who already work consciously with visual methods or plan to, but its deeper message concerns everyone: all geographers work with visual aspects, whether with their own eyes in the field, in producing maps and graphics, in using photographs, or in communicating results. Readers expecting concrete methodological instructions will not find them here, a limitation the introduction acknowledges by pointing to the separate VISQUAL Methodbox developed by the same DFG network. What the handbook offers instead is inspiration and reflection, opening spaces for critical, self-aware research, even if some chapters only scratch the surface of empirical practice. On one point the reviewer leaves no ambiguity, quoting Jeannine Wintzer’s closing appeal: people are reached through visualization, and researchers should engage with it.

Subject of Research: Visualization of qualitative geographical research and the role of visual methods in knowledge production

Article Title: Book review: Visualisierung Qualitativer Geographien – Ein Handbuch

Article References: Kuhn, L. (2026). Book review: Visualisierung Qualitativer Geographien – Ein Handbuch. Geographica Helvetica, 81(2), 305-309. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-305-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-305-2026

Keywords: cartography, qualitative geography, visualization, visual methods, critique of representation, book review, geography, remote sensing, artificial intelligence, film geography, participatory mapping, embodied knowledge

E-governance, as a field of study, sits at the intersection of public administration theory, information systems research, and political science. It asks not merely whether a government has a portal or an app, but how digital tools alter the relationship between the state and the citizen, how bureaucratic incentives shift when services are automated, and how accountability functions when decisions are mediated by software. The book under review positions itself across both theory and application, a pairing that the review treats as one of its notable strengths, since many works in the field tend to privilege one side of that divide at the expense of the other.

One of the intellectual anchors visible in the review’s framing is the technology acceptance model, originally developed by F. D. Davis in 1989. The model, among the most cited frameworks in information systems research, holds that two perceptions largely determine whether users adopt a new technology: perceived usefulness, the belief that the tool will improve performance, and perceived ease of use, the belief that operating it will be free of excessive effort. Applied to government services, the model raises an uncomfortable question for digital transformation programs. A citizen who finds an online tax portal confusing, or a civil servant who sees no efficiency gain in a new workflow system, will quietly abandon the technology no matter how ambitious the policy announcement behind it was.

The review’s reference list also points to the role of trust, drawing on work by Gefen and Straub on trust and the technology acceptance model in online shopping, and on McKnight, Choudhury, and Kacmar’s 2002 typology of trust measures for e-commerce. That lineage matters because the stakes differ sharply between buying a book online and interacting with a state. Trust in an e-commerce platform concerns whether a transaction will complete as promised. Trust in e-governance concerns whether personal data will be protected, whether an algorithmic decision can be contested, and whether the digital interface is a genuine channel of the state or a barrier placed in front of it. Scholars in the field have long argued that without institution-based trust, the adoption curves of government technology flatten regardless of usability.

A third theoretical pillar is Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations, in its fifth edition from 2003, which also appears among the works cited in the review. Rogers’s framework describes how innovations spread through social systems over time, carried first by innovators and early adopters and only later reaching the early and late majorities, with the laggards arriving last, if at all. Transposed to the public sector, the framework helps explain why digital government initiatives so often produce uneven outcomes. A national identity system may be embraced in capital cities while failing to penetrate rural regions, not because the technology is deficient but because the diffusion process depends on communication channels, social networks, and the perceived compatibility of the innovation with existing values and practices.

The review connects these classic frameworks to contemporary developments in the journal’s own pages. Among the works it cites is a 2024 study by Menke, Gomes, and Xavier on the impacts of AI-based anti-corruption audits on risk aversion in decision-making, using Brazil’s ALICE tool as a case study. ALICE applies artificial intelligence to detect anomalies in public procurement, one of the most corruption-prone areas of government activity. The study’s findings on how such audits change the behavior of officials, making them more risk-averse in their decisions, illustrate a theme that runs through the modern e-governance literature: technology does not merely make administration faster, it reshapes the incentives and even the psychology of the people inside the bureaucracy.

Another cited contribution, W. Potipiroon’s 2024 analysis of the TikTok ban votes in the United States House of Representatives, pushes the discussion beyond administration and into technopolitics, the terrain where governments regulate, restrict, and weaponize the same digital platforms that citizens use daily. The inclusion of such work in the review’s frame signals that e-governance can no longer be understood as a one-way story of states adopting tools. States are also actors in a contested digital ecosystem, weighing national security against platform economies, and their choices feed back into public trust in every government technology initiative.

The journal hosting the review, Global Public Policy and Governance, is published by Springer Nature under the exclusive license of the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University, and its scope spans e-governance, public administration theory, science and technology governance, and technopolitics. That breadth is deliberate. The questions raised by Trotta’s book, and by Zhao’s assessment of it, do not respect the boundary between domestic administration and international affairs. A data localization rule in one country affects cloud providers on other continents. An identity platform designed for service delivery can become an instrument of surveillance. The field’s journals increasingly treat these as a single, connected problem set.

What makes the review timely, beyond its scholarly content, is the trajectory of the field it surveys. Since the book’s 2018 publication, governments worldwide have deployed artificial intelligence for everything from fraud detection to chatbot citizen services, while simultaneously confronting the governance failures those deployments can produce, including biased algorithms, opaque automated decisions, and data breaches. The theoretical toolkit highlighted in the review, spanning acceptance models, trust typologies, and diffusion theory, was largely built for an era of websites and portals. Whether those frameworks can carry the weight of generative AI in the public sector is now one of the field’s open questions, and reviews like this one serve as checkpoints on how well the existing literature has prepared researchers for that transition.

For readers outside academia, the practical takeaway is that the success of digital government is not primarily a technical achievement. It is a behavioral and institutional one, resting on whether citizens find digital services useful and easy, whether they trust the institutions behind the interfaces, and whether innovations diffuse through society rather than stalling among early adopters. The review of Advances in E-governance, published as Global Public Policy and Governance Volume 5, pages 82 to 86, consolidates a body of theory that has quietly shaped how governments around the world build their digital faces, and it underscores that the hardest problems in e-governance are the oldest ones in public administration: trust, legitimacy, and the enduring challenge of making institutions work for the people they serve.

Subject of Research: A scholarly review of a book on the theory and application of e-governance technological initiatives

Article Title: Trotta, A. M. (2018). Advances in E-governance: Theory and application of technological initiatives. Routledge

Article References: Zhao, B. (2025). Trotta, A. M. (2018). Advances in E-governance: Theory and application of technological initiatives. Routledge. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(1), 82-86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00111-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00111-1

Keywords: e-governance, public administration, digital government, technology acceptance model, trust, diffusion of innovations, artificial intelligence, anti-corruption, technopolitics, book review, public policy, digital transformation

Scotto’s book, running to 202 pages, takes as its conceptual anchor the theory of intergovernmentalism, the family of approaches in European Union studies that treats member states, and especially their executives, as the decisive actors in European integration. In the classic formulation associated with scholars such as Andrew Moravcsik, national governments negotiate on behalf of domestically defined interests, and the outcomes of those negotiations reflect the relative bargaining power and preferences of the states at the table. A related strand, often called liberal intergovernmentalism, adds a two-level logic in which governments first aggregate domestic preferences and then bargain internationally, with institutions designed largely to lock in credible commitments. The rival view, neofunctionalism, has long predicted the opposite dynamic: crises create functional pressures that push integration forward, transferring authority to bodies such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the Court of Justice as spillovers accumulate.

What makes the book’s framing timely, as the review underscores, is the sheer density of crises the Union has navigated in recent years. The eurozone sovereign debt crisis that began around 2010 forced unprecedented interventions, including bailout programs administered with the Commission and the International Monetary Fund, the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, and the launch of the European Central Bank’s Outright Monetary Transactions program, which signaled a willingness to backstop sovereign debt markets. The migration crisis of 2015 exposed deep fractures over burden-sharing and border control. The Brexit referendum of 2016 marked the first negotiated departure of a member state. And the COVID-19 pandemic produced the NextGenerationEU recovery instrument, a joint borrowing program of historic scale that many observers read as a departure from orthodox intergovernmental caution. Each episode generated its own reform debate, from treaty change proposals to quieter institutional adaptations, and each became a test case for theories of integration.

The analytical stakes of this debate are considerable. If intergovernmentalist accounts are correct, then the Union’s crisis responses should be legible as bargains among powerful member states, with Germany and France setting the terms, smaller states negotiating concessions, and supranational institutions acting primarily as agents of the governments that created them. If neofunctionalist or federalist accounts are correct, crisis responses should show autonomous agenda-setting by the Commission, doctrinal innovation by courts and central banks, and a ratchet effect in which emergency measures, once adopted, are never fully unwound. The empirical record is genuinely mixed. The European Stability Mechanism is an intergovernmental treaty organization outside the EU legal framework, a seemingly intergovernmentalist fact. Yet the ECB’s crisis management, the Commission’s role in policing bailout conditionality, and the community method elements of pandemic recovery spending all point toward supranational entanglement that pure state-centric models struggle to capture.

Scotto’s contribution, as characterized in the review, is to treat these episodes not as isolated stress tests but as a connected sequence through which a particular kind of order, an intergovernmental one, is repeatedly strained and repeatedly repaired. The notion of fragility in the title is doing real conceptual work. It suggests that the EU’s intergovernmental architecture is neither robust in the way federal systems are nor disposable in the way purely contractual arrangements are. Instead, it survives crisis through improvisation: new instruments are bolted on, informal norms are stretched, and the boundary between what member states control collectively and what has been delegated to Union institutions is continuously renegotiated. This resonates with a broader trend in EU studies away from grand theories of integration and toward fine-grained analysis of governance modes, differentiated integration, and the politics of emergency.

The review situates the book within a scholarly conversation that includes long-standing frameworks for analyzing decision-making in the European Union, such as the analytical typology advanced by John Peterson in the mid-1990s, which distinguished among different levels and arenas of EU decision-making, from the day-to-day management of policies to the system-defining choices made at European Council summits. It also connects to comparative work on regional institutions, including the volume Crafting Cooperation by Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston, which examined how regional organizations across the world design institutions to manage cooperation and conflict. Placing the EU in this comparative frame matters because it resists the temptation to treat European integration as sui generis, an exception to every rule. Seen alongside ASEAN, Mercosur, or the African Union, the EU’s intergovernmental core looks less like an anomaly and more like one variant of a general problem: how sovereign states build durable collective institutions without surrendering the sovereignty that defines them.

For readers outside the specialized field, the practical implications are easier to grasp than the theoretical vocabulary might suggest. The way the EU handles crises determines who pays, who decides, and who is accountable. Intergovernmental crisis management tends to concentrate decision-making in European Council meetings and finance ministry negotiations, venues where heads of government answer to national electorates but where transparency is limited and smaller states have thin margins of influence. Supranational crisis management routes decisions through the Commission and the Parliament, adding layers of legal constraint and democratic oversight but also slowing responses and insulating decision-makers from direct national control. The pandemic recovery fund illustrated the trade-off vividly: joint borrowing on that scale would have been unthinkable under a strictly intergovernmental settlement, yet its distribution was negotiated in marathon summits in which national leaders, notably the so-called frugal states, extracted rebates and conditions. The resulting instrument was neither purely federal nor purely intergovernmental but a hybrid forged under emergency conditions.

The book’s attention to the reform process, as the review emphasizes, extends the analysis beyond crisis response to the question of what comes after the emergency. Formal treaty revision in the EU is famously difficult, requiring unanimity among member states and, for many changes, ratification in every national parliament and, in some cases, referendums. The bitter experience of the rejected Constitutional Treaty in 2005 and the years of institutional wrangling that produced the Lisbon Treaty taught EU actors to prefer instruments that avoid treaty change: intergovernmental treaties among subsets of states, enhanced cooperation among willing members, reinterpretation of existing legal provisions, and informal agreements among institutions. This repertoire of reform without revision is precisely the terrain on which fragile intergovernmental orders are maintained. It allows the Union to adapt to shocks while deferring the fundamental constitutional questions that each shock raises, a strategy that buys time but, critics argue, accumulates democratic and legal ambiguities.

There is also a normative dimension that the review’s framing invites readers to consider. Intergovernmentalism is often defended on democratic grounds: national governments are elected and accountable, so concentrating power in their hands keeps EU decision-making tethered to national electorates. It is criticized on the same grounds: intergovernmental bargaining happens behind closed doors, empowers executives over legislatures, and leaves citizens of smaller or weaker states with little say over decisions that bind them. The fragility Scotto identifies is therefore not only institutional but democratic. An order that survives crisis through executive improvisation may erode the legitimacy it needs to survive the next crisis. As the European Union confronts ongoing debates about enlargement, treaty reform, defense integration, and the rule of law within member states, the question of whether its intergovernmental core can absorb further strain remains open.

The review by Zejin Liu, published on 14 July 2025 in Global Public Policy and Governance, a journal affiliated with the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University, signals that these questions are being read well beyond Europe. For scholars of comparative regionalism and global governance, the EU remains the most institutionally dense experiment in voluntary supranational cooperation ever attempted, and its crisis-driven evolution offers lessons, and warnings, for every other region contemplating deeper integration. Scotto’s book, whatever its ultimate place in the theoretical literature, addresses the central paradox of that experiment: the Union is simultaneously a construction of sovereign states and a force that constrains them, and the tension between those two identities is not a design flaw to be engineered away but the enduring condition of the European order itself. Fragile orders, the book’s title suggests, are the only kind the EU will ever have, and understanding their fragility is the first step toward understanding their resilience.

Subject of Research: Intergovernmentalism in European Union crisis governance and institutional reform

Article Title: Matteo Scotto: Fragile orders: Understanding intergovernmentalism in the context of EU crises and reform process Menaggio, Italy: Villa Vigoni Editore, 2022, 202 pp

Article References: Liu, Z. (2025). Matteo Scotto: Fragile orders: Understanding intergovernmentalism in the context of EU crises and reform process Menaggio, Italy: Villa Vigoni Editore, 2022, 202 pp. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 297-301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00119-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00119-7

Keywords: European Union, intergovernmentalism, EU crises, institutional reform, European integration, eurozone crisis, Brexit, COVID-19 recovery, EU governance, regional institutions, book review, political science

The central argument of the book, as framed by the review, is that climate policy and social policy cannot be treated as separate domains. When governments phase out internal combustion engines, retrofit homes for energy efficiency, or restructure energy systems around renewables, the costs and benefits of those changes are distributed unevenly across society. Low-income households, older people, renters, and communities dependent on carbon-intensive industries often face the steepest barriers to participating in the new low-carbon economy. Snell and Middlemiss, both established researchers on energy and poverty, argue that a transition which ignores these distributional questions risks being both unjust and politically fragile.

This concern sits within a broader intellectual tradition known as the just transition. The concept originated in the labour movement as a demand that workers displaced by environmental regulation should not be abandoned, and it has since been widened considerably. Scholars such as Newell and Mulvaney, whose work on the political economy of just transition is cited in the review, have traced how the term has travelled from union bargaining tables into national climate plans and international governance frameworks. More recent analyses, including a 2023 study by Newell and colleagues on the global governance of just transitions, have highlighted persistent gaps between the rhetoric of justice and the institutional machinery needed to deliver it.

Parallel to this, the field of energy justice has developed a conceptual vocabulary for evaluating energy systems. Jenkins and colleagues, in a widely cited 2016 conceptual review, distinguished between distributive justice, which concerns who bears costs and receives benefits; procedural justice, which concerns who participates in decision-making; and recognition justice, which concerns whose needs and identities are acknowledged by policy. Healy and Barry extended this framework by politicising energy transitions, arguing that questions of who owns and controls energy infrastructure are inseparable from questions of fairness. Schlosberg and Collins similarly traced the evolution from environmental justice to climate justice, showing how the discourse has broadened from the siting of polluting facilities to the global inequities of climate impacts and responses.

What distinguishes Snell and Middlemiss’s contribution, according to the review, is its explicit integration of social inclusion research into this justice-oriented landscape. Social exclusion, as conceptualised in the influential multi-dimensional analysis by Levitas and colleagues, is not simply a lack of income but a compound condition involving restricted access to resources, services, social relations, and political voice. By bringing this framework into conversation with climate policy, the authors are able to show that the populations most at risk of exclusion from mainstream society are frequently the same populations most burdened by decarbonisation measures. A household in fuel poverty, for instance, may be unable to afford the upfront costs of a heat pump, may rent a property where efficiency upgrades require landlord consent, and may lack the political leverage to influence local energy planning.

The review situates the book within what Wibeck and colleagues describe in 2026 as the widening scope of just transitions research. What began as a concern with coal miners and oil workers has expanded to encompass consumers, communities, and entire regions, and increasingly to questions of global equity between the Global North and South. Wang and Lo’s 2021 conceptual review documented this proliferation of meanings, noting that the term just transition is now invoked by actors with sharply different interests, from trade unions to corporations to multilateral institutions. In this crowded conceptual space, a book that grounds the discussion in the concrete, measurable realities of social exclusion performs a valuable clarifying function.

Technical detail matters here, because the mechanisms of exclusion in the net zero transition are often embedded in the design of policy instruments themselves. Grant-based retrofit schemes typically require homeowners to pay upfront costs and reclaim money later, a structure that systematically excludes households without savings or access to credit. Electric vehicle subsidies disproportionately benefit higher-income buyers who can afford new cars, while the used-car market, second-hand market, and public transport alternatives receive less support. Carbon pricing, the economist’s favoured tool, is frequently regressive in its incidence, taking a larger share of income from poorer households unless revenues are recycled progressively. Snell and Middlemiss’s analysis, as reflected in the review, pushes policymakers to examine these design features rather than treating injustice as an unfortunate side effect to be remedied after the fact.

The book also speaks to a growing mobility justice critique of technology-centred transition strategies. Henderson’s 2020 argument that electric vehicles are not the answer exemplifies this line of thought: replacing every internal combustion car with an electric equivalent would do little to address congestion, road danger, sedentary lifestyles, or the exclusion of those who cannot drive at all. A genuinely just climate future, on this view, requires rethinking systems of provision rather than swapping the energy source that powers them. This systems perspective aligns with the book’s emphasis on inclusion, since questions about who benefits from transport, housing, and energy systems are inherently questions about social structure, not merely about technology.

Zhao’s review, published on 2 October 2026, presents the book as a synthesis that will be useful to researchers, students, and policymakers alike, drawing together literatures that too often run in parallel. The reviewer, who conceived and wrote the review independently and declares no competing interests and no specific funding, frames the book’s core achievement as demonstrating that social inclusion is not an optional add-on to climate policy but a precondition for its success. Transitions that leave large groups behind generate resistance, erode public consent, and can stall precisely the decarbonisation they were meant to advance. The political turbulence that has accompanied fuel taxes, low-emission zones, and boiler replacement schemes in several countries illustrates the practical stakes of this argument.

As net zero deadlines draw closer, the questions raised by Just Climate Futures are likely to become only more pressing. Who decides which communities are transformed first, and who sits at the table when those decisions are made? How are the costs of grid upgrades, home retrofits, and industrial restructuring shared between taxpayers, energy users, and shareholders? And how can policy be designed so that the households with the least capacity to adapt are protected rather than penalised? Snell and Middlemiss do not claim that these tensions can be resolved by technical fixes alone. Their contribution, as the review makes clear, is to insist that a credible climate strategy must be measured not only in tonnes of carbon avoided but in the fairness of the society it builds, ensuring that the path to a low-carbon future is one that people from all walks of life can walk together.

Subject of Research: Social inclusion and justice in the net zero climate transition

Article Title: Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition

Article References: Zhao, S. (2026). Carolyn Snell and Lucie Middlemiss. Just climate futures: integrating social inclusion into the net zero transition. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01150-8

Keywords: just transition, net zero, energy justice, social inclusion, climate policy, fuel poverty, social exclusion, decarbonisation, environmental justice, climate equity, energy transition, book review

The review is authored by Setälä, who is affiliated with the Department of Philosophy, Contemporary History and Political Science at the University of Turku in Finland. Her positioning within a department that bridges normative political theory and empirical political science is relevant to how the assessment is framed, since debates about future generations sit precisely at that intersection. Questions about whether democratic institutions can adequately weigh the welfare of people born decades from now are simultaneously philosophical, about moral standing and obligation, and institutional, about electoral incentives, constitutional design, and administrative practice. A reviewer trained in that combined tradition is well placed to evaluate whether a book on the topic delivers both conceptual clarity and practical institutional proposals.

The book under review, Future-Generation Government, appears at a moment when the problem it addresses has moved from the margins of political theory toward the center of public policy debate. Climate change, sovereign debt, pension sustainability, biodiversity loss, and long-lived infrastructure decisions all create situations in which the costs or benefits of today’s choices fall heavily on people who have no vote in making them. Standard democratic mechanisms, built around short electoral cycles and present-day electorates, provide no formal channel through which tomorrow’s citizens can register their interests. Chesterley’s book engages directly with this structural gap, asking what kinds of governmental arrangements could plausibly give future-oriented considerations durable institutional weight rather than leaving them to the fluctuating attention of current politics.

McGill-Queen’s University Press, the publisher of the volume, is a long-established academic press jointly supported by McGill University and Queen’s University, with a catalogue that spans political science, public policy, and Canadian and international affairs. Its decision to publish the book signals that the topic has reached a level of maturity where a sustained monograph treatment is warranted. Academic presses typically subject such manuscripts to peer review before acceptance, meaning the arguments in Future-Generation Government have already passed through scholarly evaluation prior to Setälä’s published assessment. The review in Global Public Policy and Governance now provides an additional layer of expert scrutiny, aimed at scholars deciding whether the book merits close engagement.

The journal hosting the review, Global Public Policy and Governance, is published by Springer and associated with the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University. Its scope covers comparative public policy, policy evaluation, policy formulation, and the institutional dimensions of governance, topics that map closely onto the subject matter of the reviewed book. The journal’s indexation of the review under subjects including climate-change policy, comparative public policy, energy policy, policy evaluation, and political institutions and economic development reflects the breadth of the policy domains in which future-generation questions arise. The cross-listing itself illustrates an important feature of the field: the problem of representing future people is not confined to environmental politics but recurs wherever policy effects are delayed across decades.

Within the scholarly literature, proposals for future-generation government typically cluster around a recognizable family of institutional mechanisms. These include parliamentary committees mandated to assess long-term impacts, independent commissioners or ombudsmen for future generations, advisory councils with statutory standing, legislative supermajority requirements for decisions imposing severe long-term harms, constitutional provisions referencing the interests of posterity, and deliberative bodies in which randomly selected citizens are asked to deliberate on behalf of those not yet born. Several jurisdictions have experimented with versions of these devices, and a growing empirical literature evaluates whether they change policy outcomes or remain symbolic. A book-length treatment such as Chesterley’s, which assembles and assesses these institutional options under a unifying framework, speaks to both political theorists studying democratic legitimacy and policy analysts evaluating real-world institutional performance.

The timing of the review, appearing in early 2026, situates it within an ongoing international conversation that has intensified alongside climate litigation and intergenerational equity arguments before constitutional and international courts. Young people’s climate suits, constitutional amendments referencing environmental protection for future generations, and the establishment of dedicated commissioners in several countries have turned an abstract philosophical puzzle into a live governance question. Reviews such as Setälä’s serve a gateway function in that conversation, helping scholars and practitioners navigate a rapidly growing literature and identify which new contributions offer genuinely new analytical machinery rather than restatements of familiar positions.

Setälä’s own scholarly background in democratic theory and deliberative and participatory democracy gives the review particular relevance for readers interested in how future-generation institutions might interact with broader democratic reform. Deliberative mini-publics, citizens’ assemblies, and participatory agenda-setting processes have been proposed and, in some cases, implemented as complements to representative institutions, and several of these designs have been suggested as vehicles for long-term representation. The intersection of deliberative democracy and future generations is one of the more active research fronts in the field, because deliberative formats are thought to lengthen time horizons: participants asked to reason publicly about justified decisions may give more weight to arguments about posterity than electoral politicians responding to immediate voter preferences. A review from a scholar embedded in this literature is therefore likely to assess Chesterley’s institutional proposals not only for their internal coherence but for how they would fit within a wider ecosystem of democratic innovation.

For the general reader, the significance of the review and the book it discusses lies in a simple framing problem that most democratic systems have never solved. Voters and the politicians accountable to them are, by construction, people alive today. Policies whose main consequences arrive in fifty or a hundred years, whether benefits such as decarbonized energy systems or costs such as accumulated debt and depleted resources, are decided by people who will not live to experience them. Economists capture part of this problem in debates over social discount rates, ethicists capture another part in arguments about obligations to distant future persons, and institutional designers attempt to capture the remainder in mechanisms that formally insert the long term into legislative and administrative procedure. Future-Generation Government engages this full spectrum, and the fact that a dedicated journal review has appeared within months of publication indicates that the book is being taken seriously as a reference point in that multidisciplinary effort.

The publication details of the review are straightforward but worth noting for readers who wish to follow up. The review, titled Review on the book Future-Generation Government by Nicholas Chesterly, appears in Global Public Policy and Governance, volume 6, pages 98 to 102, with a publication date of 9 January 2026 and an issue date of March 2026. It carries the DOI 10.1007/s43508-025-00134-8 and is available through SpringerLink. The reviewer declares no conflicting interests with the book’s author, and the article is published under exclusive licence to the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University. For researchers in public policy, political theory, climate governance, and institutional design, the review offers a concise expert entry point into a book that asks whether the machinery of government can be rebuilt to look beyond the next election, and the early attention it has received suggests that the question of how to govern on behalf of future generations will remain on the research agenda for years to come.

Subject of Research: Institutional representation of future generations in government and public policy

Article Title: Review on the book Future-Generation Government by Nicholas Chesterly (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025)

Article References: Setälä, M. (2026). Review on the book Future-Generation Government by Nicholas Chesterly (McGill-Queens University Press, 2025). Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(1), 98-102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00134-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00134-8

Keywords: future generations, public policy, governance, political institutions, democratic theory, intergenerational equity, climate-change policy, policy evaluation, book review, deliberative democracy, constitutional design, Global Public Policy and Governance

The NOMOS series has long served as a flagship venue for American political and legal philosophy, bringing together scholars to interrogate a single concept from multiple angles. Each volume gathers contributions that, while authored independently, are expected to speak to one another and to a shared theme. What makes the LXVII installment notable, according to Christie’s review, is that the contributors genuinely achieve that ambition. Rather than producing a scattered collection of essays, the authors build on one another’s central theses across the book, sustaining what the reviewer describes as a connected and coherent thread from beginning to end.

At the heart of that thread is a provocative claim: climate change cannot be adequately understood without placing it within a trifecta of law, ideology, and power relations. This framing pushes back hard against the widely held assumption that the climate crisis is primarily a market failure to be corrected with the right carbon price or a technology gap to be closed with better engineering. Instead, the volume’s contributors argue that the shapes of our economies, the legal frameworks that protect them, and the ideological commitments that legitimize them are themselves constitutive parts of the problem. Fossil fuels are not simply an energy source in this account; they are entangled with what scholars call fossil capital, the accumulated economic and political power of industries whose business models depend on continued greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the volume’s most distinctive contributions, the review notes, is its political economic analysis of consumer sovereignty. In mainstream economic thought, consumers are treated as sovereign actors whose aggregate choices determine what markets produce. The contributors to the volume subject this assumption to sustained critique, asking whether the idea of consumer sovereignty obscures the way corporate power, advertising, infrastructure, and law structure the very choices individuals appear to make freely. By linking climate change to this critique, the book connects the crisis to modern economic and political regimes and to the ideologies that sustain them, suggesting that individualizing responsibility for emissions may itself serve powerful interests.

This line of argument places the volume in conversation with a growing body of scholarship that treats economic dominance as a form of oppression. Christie’s review highlights that the book offers readers an opportunity to critically assess power distributions in market relations and to ground contemporary understandings of economic dominance in the concrete realities of a warming planet. In other words, the climate crisis becomes a lens through which long-standing debates in political philosophy about domination, exploitation, and justice acquire new urgency and new empirical content. The atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, on this view, is not merely an environmental indicator but a record of who holds power and how that power has been exercised over centuries of industrial development.

The intellectual lineage behind such arguments is visible in the works the review cites as context. Matthew Huber’s Climate Change as Class War, published by Verso in 2022, argued that climate politics is inseparable from class politics and that decarbonization is a struggle over who controls production. Romain Felli’s The Great Adaptation examined how capitalism adapts to, rather than merely causes, climate catastrophe. The review’s reference list also reaches back to Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, signaling the volume’s engagement with the tradition of ideology critique, the project of exposing how ideas that appear natural or neutral serve particular material interests. Scholars of resilience and adaptation, including Mikulewicz’s critique of climate-resilient development, further inform the volume’s skepticism toward technocratic solutions that leave power relations untouched.

The breadth of epistemic frames represented in the book is one of its strengths, according to the review. Contributions draw on political philosophy, political economy, legal theory, and interdisciplinary environmental thought, and the volume is positioned to interest critical and interdisciplinary climate scholars across these fields. The subjects associated with the review itself, ranging from philosophy of economics and political economy of energy to ecocriticism and political anthropology, reflect that breadth. This interdisciplinarity matters because climate change, as the volume insists, is a complex social and economic problem that resists capture by any single discipline. The physical science of the climate system, as synthesized by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2022 report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, establishes the urgency; the volume’s contributors argue that understanding why societies fail to respond adequately requires the analytic tools of the humanities and social sciences.

Yet the review is candid about the book’s limitations. Christie observes that although the authors advance their arguments from various epistemic frames, the volume offers no practical guideposts for readers who desire them, particularly those interested in policy and decision-making. There are no prescriptions for carbon pricing schedules, regulatory designs, or international treaty frameworks. This absence is not presented as a fatal flaw; indeed, for a volume in a philosophy series, the omission may be deliberate, reflecting a view that action without adequate diagnosis risks reproducing the very structures that produced the crisis. Still, the reviewer notes that practitioners, policymakers, and applied researchers may finish the book with a sharpened critical toolkit but without direct guidance on what to do next, and the scholarly contributions remain substantial despite this gap.

The tension the review identifies, between diagnostic depth and prescriptive clarity, mirrors a broader debate within the climate research community. One camp holds that the urgency documented by climate science demands immediate, actionable policy, and that philosophical critique is a luxury the planet cannot afford. The other camp, which this volume represents, contends that decades of policy action have failed precisely because they have not confronted the underlying distributions of power, the legal entrenchment of fossil interests, and the ideological commitments that make high-carbon lifestyles appear normal and inevitable. From this perspective, work like that collected in NOMOS LXVII is not a detour from climate action but a prerequisite for it, since solutions that ignore structure tend to shift burdens onto the vulnerable while leaving the drivers of emissions intact.

For readers seeking a rigorous, coherent, and unflinching examination of climate change as a phenomenon of law, ideology, and power, Christie’s review suggests that Cordelli and Lane’s volume delivers. It frames the crisis within the economic and political regimes that produced it, challenges comfortable assumptions about markets and consumer choice, and grounds debates about domination and justice in the realities of a warming world. Its scholarly contributions are substantial and its internal coherence notable for an edited collection. Its refusal to provide a practical roadmap will frustrate some, but it may also sharpen the questions that any adequate climate politics must eventually answer: not only how to decarbonize, but whose power must be confronted, whose ideology unmasked, and whose laws rewritten in the process.

Subject of Research: Political philosophy of climate change, examining fossil capital, consumer sovereignty, and the role of law, ideology, and power relations in the climate crisis

Article Title: Chiara Cordelli and Melissa Lane. Climate change: NOMOS LXVII

Article References: Christie, E. (2026). Chiara Cordelli and Melissa Lane. Climate change: NOMOS LXVII. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01145-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01145-5

Keywords: climate change, NOMOS, political philosophy, fossil capital, consumer sovereignty, political economy, ideology, power relations, book review, Chiara Cordelli, Melissa Lane, NYU Press