This chapter presents a case study analysing the challenges and lessons learned from Bahrain’s gas inventory reporting initiative. The analysis focuses on environmental data openness and the experience gained from Bahrain’s National Communications to the UNFCCC. Unfortunately, many regional organisations have varying amounts of experience in data collection, warehousing, and governance. This chapter argues that open environmental data and good data governance could contribute a great deal toward ensuring accountability and transparency. The case study covers challenges faced in Bahrain’s National Communications from 2005 to 2020. It addresses the primary challenges in the greenhouse gas (GHG) Inventory data process and recommends robust data governance practices to improve accuracy, reliability, and transparency in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change GHG inventory data collection. Through analysing past challenges from GHG inventory reporting, the findings underscore the importance of open data, data quality assurance, standardised methodologies, and stakeholder engagement in promoting data transparency and improving the effectiveness of GHG inventory reporting. The chapter also points to best practices globally for GHG inventory data management and then proposes an adapted data governance framework for the GHG inventory. The framework outlines the essential aspects of data governance and proposes a framework for designing effective data governance structures within organisations.

Chapter 3 presents localized peace enforcement theory. It first discusses the challenges facing individuals involved in a communal dispute. Reflecting on these obstacles to peaceful dispute resolution, the chapter outlines a formal micro-level theory of dispute escalation between two individuals from different social groups who live in the same community. It explains how international intervention shapes escalation dynamics. The chapter then shifts the focus to local perceptions of intervener impartiality, which the theory posits are a key determinant of whether a UN intervention succeeds in preventing the onset of violence. The identifies the importance of multilateralism, diversity, and the nonuse of force as critical factors shaping local perceptions and, as a result, UN peacekeeping effectiveness. Critically, the theory does not suggest that UN peacekeepers will always succeed, or that all kinds of UN peacekeepers will succeed. Indeed, perceptions of UN peacekeepers vary depending on the troop-contributing country and the identity of the civilians involved in the dispute. The chapter closes with a discussion of the most important hypotheses derived from the theory.

This chapter investigates the interaction between people and their built environments to understand the drivers of occupants’ indoor comfort and related energy behaviors. The study surveys 2,600 participants divided into high and low consumer categories, examining the relationship between human indoor comfort perceptions, occupants’ characteristics, and building features. The chapter concludes with an in-depth analysis of the relationship between comfort perceptions and consumption, consequence awareness, self-responsibility, habits, and norms. Furthermore, the chapter introduces a human–building interaction (HBI) concept mapping, which serves as a comprehensive and adaptable framework for guiding evaluation and planning processes in the field. By considering occupant comfort and energy use as fundamental elements in sustainable building design and operation, the introduced integrated framework aims to provide a reliable and flexible tool for analyzing and optimizing building performance. Ultimately, this framework can be utilized to develop targeted strategies that enhance the efficiency of energy policies and sustainability performance indicators, thereby facilitating the transition to net zero and carbon-neutral buildings.

The chapter overviews the current energy demand trends in the building sector for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region and countries. Specifically, the historical trends of the energy efficiency performance of buildings are discussed. The increasing air-conditioning needs due to the hard climate in the GCC region are highlighted, including the impacts of various space cooling technologies and operation strategies on the energy consumption of buildings in the GCC region. In addition, the chapter discusses the main challenges for improving energy performance and achieving carbon neutrality for the built environment in the GCC countries. Finally, the chapter evaluates potential benefits for large-scale energy efficiency programmes specific to new and existing building stocks within the GCC region. The benefits encompass both cost effectiveness as well as energy productivity metrics accounting for the social, economic, and environmental impacts of various large-scale policy programmes with the aim to improve the energy efficiency and carbon neutrality of building stocks.

This chapter describes the data collection strategy and multimethod research design employed to test the theory in the subsequent chapters of the book. The structure of the empirical analysis mirrors the book’s primary argument: to show how peacekeeping works from the bottom up, from the individual to the community to the country. Given that UN peacekeepers deploy to the most violent areas, the design needed to account for selection bias as well as other confounding variables in order to make causal inference possible. Using data from individual- and subnational/community-level data from Mali as well as cross-national data from the universe of multidimensional PKOs deployed in Africa, the book employs a three-part strategy to test the hypotheses in the next few chapters. First, the book considers the micro-level behavioral implications of the theory using a lab-in-the-field experiment and a survey experiment, both implemented in Mali. Second, it test whether UN peacekeepers’ ability to increase individual willingness to cooperate aggregates upward to prevent communal violence in Mali. Third, the book considers whether these findings extend to other countries.

This chapter focuses on the global decarbonisation policy gap and the need to account for measurable policies for carbon neutrality, specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. One strategy to raise accountability is policy tracking, a technique that has gained traction in empirical policy analysis. The chapter introduces this technique and provides an example of a methodologically rigorous tracking of climate policies in the GCC countries in response to pledges and obligations under the Paris Agreement. This includes government policies, laws, and measures toward the mitigation goals of the Paris Agreement and carbon neutrality targets. We situate our tracker in the wider landscape of policy metrics and indexes, discuss its features, and present results on mitigation and energy policy responses to the climate crisis in the Gulf. Key conclusions are that stringency, intensity, effectiveness, and sustainability of measures vary widely across the sample and over time. Necessary macroeconomic, fiscal, technological, and social policy measures also vary greatly in terms of their intensity and the public investments made. In some GCC countries, policy measures appear to be disproportionate to the challenges linked to both reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Gulf countries’ very own nationally determined contributions (NDCs), to varying degrees.

This chapter examines local-level peacekeeping operations in a cross-national context. The analysis draws on a dataset of nearly 400,000 georeferenced troop deployments in sub-Saharan Africa from 1999 to 2019. Consistent with the theory’s predictions, it demonstrates that increases in the number of peacekeeping troops deployed to local communities are strongly positively associated with decreases in the onset of communal violence. Since cross-national data of this sort cannot directly measure local perceptions of peacekeepers cross-nationally, the study tallies the number of peacekeepers from former colonial powers and neighboring countries deployed to each area as a proxy for perceptions of bias. The patterns further vary in ways that support the logic of localized peace enforcement theory. Specifically, the evidence shows that there is no relationship between the deployment of these two types of peacekeepers and levels of communal violence. The analyses presented in the chapter also detect a strong negative association between all other types of peacekeepers, likely to be perceived as impartial, and the onset of communal violence.