José Juan González

Over the last decades, the ongoing global energy transition and the quest for innovative ways to promote energy efficiency; and to reduce the environmental footprints, infrastructure gaps, and costs of electricity from centralized energy systems, have resulted in an exponential rise in initiatives aimed at advancing Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). The rising focus on DERs across the world means that the sustainability of future electricity systems will be evaluated and governed by four key vectors of transformation (the four ‘Ds’): (a) decarbonization; (b) decentralization; (c) digitalization; and (d) democratization. However, despite the promise and potential of DERs, a wide range of environmental, social, and economic challenges arise in their implementation, which if not holistically addressed could limit the full potential of DERs to advance a secure and sustainable energy future. Those concerns have to do with sustainability and are addressed by this book. Overall, the book aims to examine the latest development of law and policy on sustainable DERs in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australasia, and North and South America; evaluate how legal and regulatory systems can better enhance sustainable DERs by addressing the wide range of environment and land tenure concerns, technology gaps, network regulation, gender justice, human rights, financing, data and consumer protection, and other broad sustainability challenges in current implementation and deployment; and provide practical recommendations on how legal, governance, and contractual frameworks, including energy entrepreneurship education, can better enhance decentralized energy communities, energy entrepreneurship, and co-operative business models, to promote a secure and sustainable energy future through DERs.

Over the last decade, net zero has become the new central and organizing paradigm of natural resources law and policy. The widespread adoption of efforts towards net zero, and the associated changes in the demand and supply patterns of natural resources, is altering the fundamental law and policy frameworks that have for several decades governed the development, commercialization, use, and management of natural resources. This chapter maps and assesses both the contours and significance of the net zero discourse, and the fundamental questions on resource sovereignty, security, and solidarity that ongoing net zero programmes and initiatives raise. The chapter also outlines the overall aim and structure of the book, providing information on the work that the twenty-two chapters of the book have done to clarify the nature, scope, and guiding principles of natural resources law and policy in a net zero era.

Net Zero and Natural Resources Law offers a comprehensive and authoritative account of the nature, scope, and guiding principles of natural resources law and policy in a net zero era. In response to the climate emergency, several countries, corporations, and other actors worldwide have announced programmes aimed at bringing down global emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change to net zero by the year 2060 or earlier. While the need for a clean energy transition is clear, incoherently designed transition programmes could produce complex environmental, social, and governance risks, including legal liability and protracted disputes. At the same time, the growing rush for minerals needed to manufacture clean energy technologies raises fundamental questions. Most crucial is how to ensure the exploration and development of energy transition minerals in a manner that does not exacerbate resource conflicts, resource nationalism, human rights violations, protectionism, energy insecurity, social exclusions, and inequity, especially in conflict-affected and high-risk regions. With case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, and Australasia, this book offers a multijurisdictional exposition of how legal and regulatory systems are responding and can better respond to the wide range of sovereignty, security, and solidarity risks in the clean energy transition. Consideration is given to a nexus and integrated resource governance roadmap—focusing on net zero-aligned natural resource contracts, legislation, mineral strategies, human rights due diligence tools, dispute resolution and cooperative mechanisms—needed to improve coherence and coordination in the design, financing, and implementation of energy transition programmes across the entire natural resource value chain.

The status of art in Plato's philosophy has always been a difficult problem. As a matter of fact, he even threw the poets out from his ideal state, a passage that has led some interpreters to assess that Plato did not develop a proper philosophy of art. Nevertheless, R. G. Collingwood, wrote an article titled “Plato's Philosophy of Art”. How can it be? What could lead one of the most important aesthetic scholars of the first half of the twentieth century to make this thesis about Plato? To understand Collingwood's position at that time, I will review it in a new light: his own philosophy of art at that moment as it was propounded in Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, a work he published that same year. I will also examine how Collingwood's position changed when he returned to the same subject in 1938, on the publication of The Principles of Art. Finally, I will end this article defending the correctness of Collingwood's earlier interpretation of Plato's position on art.

It is a common statement in the most traditional views of the history of the philosophy of art to consider the nineteenth century as the moment of birth of the expressionist theory of art, a theory that ended pushing aside the already declining imitation theory of art. It is also usually understood that the expressionist theory defended that the essence of art was to express emotion, that the artist aim was to translate somehow emotions into artworks, and that these emotions ended in some way reaching the audience or the public of the work of art that was contemplated, listened to, or read... This explanation of art received a further development during the first half of the twentieth century by R. G. Collingwood among others, but was soon replaced by other theories that moved in a wider scope. Nevertheless Collingwood's approach to art continues being a reference for the reflection of many contemporary philosophers, although the general sense of their approach to his philosophy of art is mainly negative: it is more worried about criticizing Collingwood's view than about understanding it. The aim of this exposition is not to defend Collingwood's explanation of art, but to show many important errors of interpretation that have become a common place in the objections that are made against his proposal. To accomplish it, I pretend to take a close look to the criticisms to his theory made by one of the most important exponents of the aesthetics of the analytical tradition, George Dickie. I have chosen him because he both summarizes and has contributed to extend quite well the general tone of the objections against Collingwood's account of art. These mainly focus on the understanding of art as imagination, on the definition of art as expression of emotion, and on the relation between these two approaches to art. By dismantling them, I hope to give some clues to help in a better understanding of these concepts in Collingwood's philosophy of art, not only because of the historical value that this might have, but because of the light that Collingwood's approach to art can throw upon contemporary reflections on the relation between art, emotion and value.