Itay Fischhendler

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Department of Geography

This study provides a new theoretical framework for unpacking the term 'energy island' and understanding its contradicting meanings. It examines why and when policymakers see their country’s electricity isolation as either a problem to be solved or an opportunity to be embraced, and what physical and institutional solutions they employ to connect t...

The energy transition process nowadays is characterized by the replacement of fossil fuels-based means of production with renewable energy (RE). Alongside the diffusion of decentralized RE, this process is associated with the increased promotion of RE megaprojects. Such megaprojects, however, are often shaped by path-dependent lock-ins and thus con...

This article explores the intersection between nationality, urban space and critical infrastructures through the lens of urban infrastructure politics. It analyses the struggle between the Israeli government and the Palestinian national movement over the Jerusalem District Electricity Company between 1967 and 1987. Based primarily on archival docum...

Memories of past experiences are at the heart of innovation processes, yet because they are difficult to operationalize, their role in the renewable energy transition remains elusive. Applying the concept of spillover to operationalize institutional memory, the current study addresses this problem for the first time. It examines how different actor...

Local communities have been identified as crucial actors in the diffusion of renewable energy, considered one of the most important eco-innovations of our time. Anecdotal evidence has indicated that local communities tend to play different roles in promoting eco-innovation, particularly renewable energy. However, what this heterogeneity looks like...

The infrastructure sector is undergoing a significant process of change, as part of which the state is reducing its direct engagement. This has spotlighted local communities, which are increasingly involved in various infrastructure projects, specifically renewable energy projects. However, because individual communities often find it difficult to...

Recent energy-related writing has highlighted the spatiality of renewable energy and its possible affinity to geopolitics. Yet, energy geography and geopolitics literature lack reference to security and how it may shape the energy landscape. This study unpacks the elusive concepts of security and territoriality and operationalizes them into measura...

The use of insurance against disasters triggered by natural hazards has become a common mechanism in the agricultural sector. Typical insurance policies, including those in the agricultural sector, specify an event or threshold beyond which insured payments are triggered. However, there is an absence of studies situating agricultural insurance agai...

In the resource curse literature, resource abundance is portrayed as a threat to peace rather than an opportunity for socio-economic development. Moving away from natural resource competition and conflict, concepts like environmental peacebuilding as well as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) focus on win–win cooperation around social and enviro...

Compensation provision is a strategy used by developers and regulators to pacify local opposition and to reduce the costs and risks of project delays and potential cancellations. While compensation is widely used, understanding what compensation should accomplish is implicit in the rationales of different compensation schemes. This review explicate...

Policy design studies have addressed the role of political and institutional limitations in formulating effective climate policies including renewable energy targets (RETs). However, it is still not entirely clear how and why these limitations result in policy designs that are incapable of staying on track to meet the overall goals of the Paris Agr...

Energy storage systems play an important role in achieving the goal of 100% electricity generation from renewable energy sources by improving their efficiency and flexibility. Anecdotal evidence around the world has shown that, beyond techno-economic factors, social factors and partnerships in particular may significantly influence the promotion of...

Public acceptance is critical to the successful implementation of renewable energy policy. Most of the literature on public acceptance within the community framework has focused on the tension between neighboring communities or the conflict between state planning processes and the needs of local communities. The community, in these cases, is often...

” Food securitization” refers to the process by which food supplies are linked to larger security issues or broader notions of human security. While this study is built on the surge of food policy studies that acknowledge the importance of discourse, rhetoric, and labeling in shaping the notion of security there is no empirical research that explic...

Renewable energy transition is one of the keys to mitigating climate change. While attention has been given to various economic, institutional, technological, and sociocultural barriers to this transition, it is unclear how acute interstate conflict shadowed by geopolitical forces shapes the deployment of renewables. The literature is split between...

This paper presents a systematic assessment of transboundary water treaties and their institutional evolution over time. While the majority of treaties tend to remain unchanged, others are renegotiated over time, either gradually by treaty amendment or abruptly by treaty replacement. This study examines the sources of treaty amendment, treaty repla...

The adoption of renewable energies contributes to sustainable development worldwide. Entrepreneurs are key agents in facilitating their promotion, as they improve the mix of the means of production and thus transform renewable energy technologies into viable energy systems. Nonetheless, the literature tends to treat entrepreneurs as a homogeneous g...

This article examines how and when energy is used as a punitive or rewarding measure to advance foreign policy ends under conditions of perpetual conflict. Drawing on hundreds of primary governmental and commercial documents, and extensive elite interviews, we examine Israeli–Palestinian relations over 50 years. We find extensive instrumentalizatio...

A considerable body of critical literature has analysed how scientific discussions on water-conflict links are picked up in the political, academic, economic, civil society and media domains. By contrast, there are almost no such studies for the domain of education. This void is crucial as school attendance rates and the prevalence of environmental...

Large infrastructure schemes have become part of our landscape. Their controversial nature often requires elaborate justifications including the use of intangible benefits. One intangible benefit that has increasingly been raised in support of mega-projects is the peace dividend. Yet, to date, few studies have systematically addressed the following...

This review brings to the fore the fast-growing and significant phenomenon of community and private sector renewable energy partnerships, which constitute a fundamental building block of the global renewable energy transformation. This paper theoretizes on this issue by identifying six archetypes of local community-private sector renewable energy p...

Environmental peacebuilding represents a paradigm shift from a nexus of environmental scarcity to one of environmental peace. It rests on the assumption that the biophysical environment’s inherent characteristics can act as incentives for cooperation and peace, rather than violence and competition. Based on this, environmental peacebuilding present...

This article proposes a re-examination of how power is conceptualized within transboundary hydropolitics by arguing that power has been misrepresented in the water resources literature. Overemphasis on the factors of a country’s relative power, riparian position, and technological potential to exploit the resource has led to assumptions that the no...

This study—addressing the absence of a specific and focused analysis of energy sanctions in current literature—provides a longitudinal and quantitative study of economic energy sanctions based on a global perspective. We unpack the design of economic energy sanctions by distinguishing their goals, their measures, and how they are imposed and evolve...

Various studies have pointed to urgency in decision-making as a major catalyst for policy change. Urgency evokes a crisis frame in which emotions and cognitive and institutional biases are more likely to be mobilised in support of the policy preferences of powerful actors. As a result, decision-makers tend to be driven by emotions and opportunity,...

The evaluation of many contested projects and policies often includes intangible benefits. Geopolitics represents one type of intangible benefit. Despite a few examples on the use of geopolitics to promote contested projects, there is a gap in the literature on how geopolitical argumentation is constructed for the purpose of promoting resource-base...

Countries often attempt to establish regional electricity grids. However, whereas research on natural resources frequently seeks to understand policy outcome through a geopolitical prism, when it comes to electricity studies the prism is always economic or technical. Hence, this study is a first attempt to identify the geopolitical dimension of cro...

Discursive studies on natural resources often fail to examine how the language of existential threats is constructed, while the probable contextual factors for triggering securitization and its implications are also left unexamined. Applied to the Israeli-Palestinian water conflict, this study utilizes negotiation protocols from the Annapolis peace...

Renewable energy technology (RET) is currently facing a multitude of barriers that hinders its effective integration into established energy systems. As a result, various advocacy mechanisms are often needed to market RET effectively, including the expression of geopolitical benefits associated with RET development, a tactic that is said to elevate...

The water literature is saturated with securitization jargon. Coloring a discourse that could have been political, technical or economic in securitization rhetoric is especially prominent in the literature and policy on the securitization of transboundary water. However, despite the tendency to address water as a securitized resource, it is often u...

The literature on environmental security often assumes complementarity between promoting sustainability and broader security goals. As sustainability and security are viewed to be positively correlated the possible tradeoffs between security objectives and aspects of sustainable development have largely been overlooked. This study examines under wh...

Although solar farms are often favorably received by the public due to their contribution to clean energy, they are not conflict-free. In various contexts, this landintensive technology often competes with other land uses like agriculture, nature reserves, and army training. As a result of this competition, interest groups often seek political leve...

The aim of this study is to place the notion of energy security under critical scrutiny by unpacking how different actors manipulate the term through the mobilization of existential language as a prism for creating securitization discourse. Through an examination of an Israeli inter-ministerial committee charged with developing national policy rega...

The literature on environmental security often stresses the complementarity between sustainability and broader security goals. Less emphasis has been placed on possible tradeoffs between security objectives and aspects of sustainability. This study examines the conditions under which these synergies and tradeoffs are likely to occur, and how the tr...

Although solar farms are often favorably received by the public due to their contribution to clean energy, they are not conflict-free. In various contexts, this land-intensive technology often competes with other land uses like agriculture, nature reserves, and army training. As a result of this competition, interest groups often seek political lev...

Given the potential for uncertainties to influence mega-projects, this study examines how mega-projects are deliberated in the public arena. The paper traces the strategies used to promote the Dead Sea Water Canal. Findings show that the Dead Sea mega-project was encumbered by ample uncertainties. Treatment of uncertainties in early coverage was do...

The effect of uncertainty on cooperation between the partners sharing the natural resources remains unknown. Uncertainty may strengthen cooperation between partners, as it is necessary to implement cooperative mitigation policies, however, it may also serve as a cause of friction between parties, as it may aggravate existing trust issues or power a...

The premise of discourse theory in environmental policy is that realities are shaped by language. One discourse that is gaining popularity is the concept of environmental security, a discourse that presupposes environmental threats as urgent. The attempt to cast environmental issues as security issues has resulted in the common use of security jarg...

Conflict resolution mechanisms (CRM's) are recognised as essential constituting elements of transboundary agreements. Earlier studies confirm that such mechanisms are either absent, incomplete or unsophisticated in water treaties. Hence, we assume that the negotiation of CRM is associated with a transaction cost, which may hinder the adoption of CR...

Toolkit A small transboundary tributari within the Syr Darya basin. Source: Kai Wegerich.

Water is one natural resource whose management is especially susceptible to uncertainties, many of which are being exasperated by climate change. Some of these uncertainties originate from knowledge deficits in physical conditions while others relate to behavioral and social variability related to water supply and use. However, to our knowledge no...

The establishment of international environmental institutions is often predicated on the assumption that cooperation is politically feasible and that regime formation is viable. However, the provision of many environmental services remains vulnerable to asymmetries in interests that impede both cooperation and adaptation. We examine governance stru...

Water issues are inherently multi-faceted and therefore water policy often involves linkages to other issues. By providing opportunities for bargaining, use of policy linkages in transboundary water negotiations can increase the possibilities of reaching agreements; however, they also involve potential political costs. While there is ample theoreti...

Integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) addresses the interconnections, complexities, and conflicts between many users of the coastal area with different goals. It requires setting managerial boundaries that capture many elements of human and natural systems. Experience teaches us that without a directed effort managerial rules and laws are not l...

"Many international efforts have been made to encourage integrated water resources management through recommendations from both the academic and the aid and development sectors. Recently, it has been argued that integrated water resources management can help foster better adaptation of management and policy responses to emerging water crises. Never...

This article examines the scale dynamics of water governance. Five generic scales are identified, each associated with a particular ideology and discourse. Hence, scale dynamics are hypothesized to oscillate as a function not only of power and economic factors (although these are central) but as reflections of shifts in dominant ideologies and shif...

Effective cooperation over wastewater control requires that wastewater treatment costs be allocated equitably to the parties involved. The Polluter Pays Principle (PPP) remains the dominant cost-sharing principle although there is considerable criticism surrounding it. This study tries to identify the appealing characteristics of the PPP even when...

Karst has a significant role in the morphology of the Judean-Samarian mountains and may be associated with potential risk to groundwater pollution. Despite this, there is little knowledge of the pattern of karst in Samaria and its origin. The purpose of this research is to characterize the karst distribution and origin within southern Samaria. A ka...

While the importance of flow variability in water treaties is acknowledged, little work has been done to identify those mechanisms that have actually been employed. The present study uses a content analysis of a large number of water treaties in order to identify approaches used in practice. It was found that flow variability has been governed usin...

Ambiguity has a clear role in facilitating closure in negotiations to regulate natural resources. However, there are no empirical studies that examine whether such "constructive ambiguity" can in fact become destructive. The aim of the present study is thus to determine when ambiguity becomes destructive during the management phase of environmental...

Cooperation over transboundary environmental resources, water in particular, has been analyzed from various perspectives. Each study identifies the problems of cooperation differently and suggests different mechanisms to enhance it. Yet, the role of ambiguity, particularly significant in treaty design to resolve environmental disputes, has thus far...

Water managers are usually implicitly assumed to be public servants whose sole purpose is to manage water in the best possible way for the public good. Yet water managers, as all bureaucrats, have interests, ideas, beliefs, and constituencies. This paper investigates whether and how differences between water managers affect the management of water...

Many places in the world are experiencing a water crisis. This water crisis is attributed to a governance crisis, whereas often fragmented institutional and physical water structures are used to explain a policy of overexploitation. The Israeli water system, which adopted integrated water resource management (IWRM), is often cited as a model for ot...

Despite the much-vaunted advantages of basin-wide management many transboundary water regimes do not conform in practice to the basin-wide scale. This study examines whether a spatial alternative that includes only parts of the basin is indeed viable. To this end the US–Canada case is examined. Two questions are asked: why has a non-basin scale bee...

Existing water policies often deviate from measures suggested by economic and environmental analysis. This is particularly true in the case of drought response policies, where effective policies are rarely adopted. This study focuses on how to enhance the political feasibility of options rather than identifying the optimal water policies. It argues...

Isolated caves are a special cave type common in most karst terrains, formed by prolonged slow water flow where aggressivity is locally boosted. The morphometry and distribution of isolated caves are used here to reconstruct the paleohydrology of a karstic mountain range. Within a homogenous karstic rock sequence, two main types of isolated caves a...

Building and operating wastewater facilities to treat transboundary effluents requires dividing the cost of pollution prevention between the bordering states. When cost-sharing questions arise, the solution often suggested is the “polluter pays principle” (PPP). However, when political and economic relations between neighboring countries are asymme...

Issue linkage is often recommended as a strategy for enhancing cooperation. Lately it has been suggested that this strategy could also be applied to the management of transboundary natural resources. The authors examine the viability of this suggestion. They argue that in the case of natural resources such a linkage may have both short-term and lon...

This study seeks to understand why nations find it difficult to include climate-uncertainty mechanisms in treaties regulating international rivers. It also aims to examine the implications of not adopting these mechanisms, particularly during a crisis. The study focuses on the negotiation process of three water treaties, and seeks to identify the u...

The conventional wisdom is that water resources should be managed on a basin-wide scale. However, a closer look at the scale of transboundary water institutions reveals that, for the most part, this is not the case. This study seeks to understand the gap between reality and theory by arguing that due to the common spatial discrepancy between benefi...

Experience shows that many initiatives to establish basin-wide management fail. This study examines whether a spatial alternative that includes only parts of the basin can work. The case study drawn on is the 1909 Boundary Treaty and International Joint Commission regulating the water shared by the U.S. and Canada. In this case a deadlock in negoti...

The Mishmar Ayyalon Reservoir was constructed in 1955 and its watershed drains the upper basins of Nahal Ayyalon and Nahal Nachshon (160 km2). It has a water storage capacity of 7.3 × 106 m3 and is the only reservoir located within the western-flowing drainage basins that drains the mountain backbone of central Israel. Because the reservoir has nev...

Adapting to climate change is a critical problem facing humanity. This involves reconsidering our lifestyles, and is linked to our actions as individuals, societies and governments. This book presents top science and social science research on whether the world can adapt to climate change. Written by experts, both academics and practitioners, it ex...