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China Goes Green is a timely wake-up call to two illusions: first, that authoritarian regimes with centralised power are more effective in environmental governance and second that China’s experienc...

The environmental governance literature has seen a proliferation of analytical terms to describe actors who try to engender change for the improvement of the environment/climate, such as entreprene...

The concept of sustainability transitions has become increasingly prominent in academic and policy discourses during recent decades, but the importance of the link between knowledge-producing epistemic practices and urban governance has been underappreciated in this discourse. Based on a case study of cycling in Copenhagen between 1900 and 2015, and drawing upon a governmentality-inspired analytical framework, this research demonstrates that transformative governance may be initiated by epistemic practices that render urban systems visible in other ways. Urban cycling has been reconstructed over time in Copenhagen as a traffic safety ‘problem’, a component of the experiential and liveable city, and a health-producing (and hence economically valuable) regional transport mode. The research findings emphasise that epistemic practices can provide a powerful stimulus for creating changes in urban governance. The results also provide support for initiatives to broaden the terms of academic debate on sustainability transitions.

The primary task for the environmental state is to address problems related to the market’s externalisation of environmental costs. It has four main resources at its disposal: regulation, redistribution, organisation, and knowledge generation. The way these four resources are deployed make up a state’s environmental governance arrangements. Using data on environmental regulation, taxes, public administrations, and knowledge production from 28 countries, and a hierarchical cluster analysis, four different types of environmental states are identified: established, emerging, partial, and weak. This is followed by some suggestions for further research on the environmental state in a comparative perspective.

Globalization entails increased interdependence and interconnectivities among distal regions and social-ecological systems. This global interregional connectedness – telecoupling – gives rise to specific sustainability challenges, which require new governance solutions. Moving beyond ‘scaling- up’ governance to address global environmental problems, and exploring the implications of telecoupling for state-led environmental governance, ways the state can effectively address telecoupled environmental issues both within and beyond national borders are addressed, drawing on the example of soy trade between Brazil and Germany. This builds on recent contributions to the literature on governance of interregional ecological challenges to elaborate potential policy and governance options, ranging from classical bilateral, multilateral, and international agreements, to information-based, economic, and hybrid governance modes. While telecoupled environmental problems create governance challenges related to scale, knowledge gaps, coordination, and state capacity, the state has an important role to play. To explore this further, interdisciplinary inquiry is required that includes but moves beyond the state.

International environmental negotiations such as the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) are state-dominated, and their outcomes are highly publicized. Less transparent is the role of non-state delegates who effect changes during negotiation processes through myriad strategies and relations. This article focuses on the influence of indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) delegates in official COP10 negotiations using collaborative event ethnography to identify and evaluate ‘moments of influence’ that have gone largely unnoticed in the literature on global environmental politics. Findings indicate that IPLC delegates influenced negotiations by enrolling, shaming, and reinforcing state actors. Such relational maneuvers and interventions may appear inconsequential, but their implications are potentially far-reaching. Recognizing moments of influence improves understandings of non-state influence, relational power, and the multiple ways diverse actors reach a...

The impacts that governments and institutions have on environmental policy-making constitute a core concern in environmental politics. Authoritarian environmentalism (AE) presents a model of top-down, non-participatory environmental policy-making. The model, however, remains underspecified with its premises untested and its application confined to non-democratic countries. This study addresses these gaps through a case study of South Korea’s Four Major Rivers Restoration Project. The study illustrates how various path-dependent legacies from the era of the authoritarian developmental state shaped the policy context in which policymakers in democratic Korea adopted AE as its approach to environmental governance. More broadly, this case demonstrates how the relationship between a type of regime and its mode of policy-making and policy outcomes is tenuous, suggesting that environmental politics should move beyond the examination of formal institutional features to incorporate various state development trajec...

In environmental governance, the European Union draws on norms of effectiveness, decentralisation, and participation to ensure that its policies and regulations are considered legitimate. This article analyses how the construction of legitimacy in European nature policy has changed over time. Although the norms of participation and decentralisation are increasingly evoked to address the needs of stakeholders and member states in the implementation and financing of Natura 2000, the norm of effectiveness continues to dominate the construction of legitimacy. Effectiveness first acquired its meaning in the context of a science-based approach to Natura 2000 to emphasise the importance of achieving its conservation objectives. More recently, it has become increasingly re-articulated as cost-effectiveness, which reflects a growing influence of neoliberal discourse. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for the legitimacy of European environmental governance.

Networks have been embraced as appropriate means for environmental governance because of their potential inclusivity, flexibility, resilience, and ability to comprehend multiple values and ways of knowing. Analysis of networks, however, falls short of accounting for the emergence and persistence of these innovative and complex modes of governance, as well as their failures. We offer a framework for using narrative to understand and evaluate networks. We understand networks to be sets of relationships, between humans and also between humans and their environment, that define and guide behaviour. Narrative is a constitutive element of these networks; narrative and network are co-produced. Narrative analysis enables a critical investigation of environmental action and policy that at the same time captures the variety of environmental relationships and associated meanings and emotions that can inspire collaborative behaviour. Using a case study of the development of alternative agriculture in the United State...

New markets are key in debates concerning environmental regimes. Critics and proponents share a discourse that characterises environmental markets in terms of scale; many discuss how to scale environmental markets ‘the right way’. Building on previous work in human geography, actor–network theory, and governmentality studies, we unpack the dual but always interwoven politics of scale-making in doing environmental policies, which consists of material-semiotic practices of producing and using scales as ontologically real ordering devices. Drawing from the results of three studies conducted independently by the authors, we analyse material-semiotic scale-making practices in different ways of enacting environmental markets. By revealing the dual politics of scale production and use in environmental markets, our analysis contributes to the study of developing and implementing environmental governance.

In 2007, the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales held reviews of their moratoriums on the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) food crops. The public inquiry form of review selected offered the best strategic pathway to amend these moratoriums to allow commercial release. As such, the reviews represented ‘political technologies’. This proposition is informed by: their formation within a policy context of pro-GM development, which saw ‘stacked’ pro-GM review panels, narrow terms of reference, and outcomes favouring a narrow coalition of agbiotechnology interests; the critical literature on public inquiries; and other evidences that suggest the underlying purpose of the public inquiries was to reach the inescapable conclusion that the moratoriums should be changed. While contributing to the literature on the public inquiry, particularly in relation to science, technology and environmental governance, these findings also invite the suggestion of new deliberative forms of the public i...

Voluntary environmental governance arrangements have focal attention in studies on environmental policy, regulation and governance. The four major debates in the contemporary literature on voluntary environmental governance arrangements are studied. The literature falls short of sufficiently specifying whether or not voluntary environmental governance arrangements are successful in addressing environmental risks. This is due to the narrow focus of many contemporary studies and a tendency to study the form and content of voluntary environmental governance arrangements in isolation from their contextual settings. In order to gain a better understanding of voluntary environmental governance arrangements, scholars are challenged to study differently structured voluntary environmental governance arrangements in different contextual settings, to move beyond single country or single voluntary environmental governance arrangements studies, and to combine quantitative and qualitative data in studying these arrangements.

Despite the government of Canada's close relationship with the biotechnology industry, critical social movement organisations have had a significant impact on the adoption of genetically modified organisms in that country. Two cases of products rejected after widespread resistance – recombinant bovine growth hormone (1999) and herbicide-tolerant Roundup Ready (RR) Wheat (2004) – are revisited. Informed by empirical research that brings to light new factors shaping the RR wheat outcome in particular, two theoretical arguments are advanced. First, in response to those critics of a neo-Gramscian framing of hegemony who see it as overly deterministic, these cases highlight just how deeply alliances with hegemonic ambitions may be forced to compromise. Second, these cases demonstrate that any study of civil society must still pay close attention to institutional and material ‘relations of force’ when seeking to explain the impact of social movements on environmental governance.

This book is written by some of the leading scholars of environmental governance and provides a valuable comparative analysis of the development of environmental policy instruments. It brings toget...

Both qualitative and quantitative research suggests that foreign donors (particularly the European Commission) have exerted a positive impact on environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) across the post-socialist, new member states of Central and Eastern Europe. Green networks have been institutionalised and the foundations for multi-level environmental governance appear to be in place. But to what extent is a similar impact occurring in the so-called ‘potential candidate countries’ of the EU in the Western Balkans? From the perspective of environmental NGOs and their engagement in Environmental Impact Assessment processes in Bosnia–Herzegovina, it appears that the impact of donor-driven capacity building is exaggerated by assessments based on quantitative data. Formal compliance with EU procedures and the existence amongst NGOs of certain ‘capacities’ is not necessarily an indicator of environmental governance.

Public participation is key to effective environmental governance, yet in China the public's role has been limited. Since 2002, China's environmental authorities have promulgated legislation that provides channels for public participation in planning processes. By defining public participation in legal terms, this legislation has facilitated the emergence of ‘rules-based’ environmental activism whereby citizens pressurise officials to uphold public participation rules. This phenomenon is examined in the context of an ‘environmentalist’ – NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) dichotomy. It is found that environmentalist NGOs engage in rules-based activism on a long-term basis to improve the institutional environment for public participation. Although NIMBYs have also interacted with public participation legislation, this is secondary to pursuing their own localised interests. Unlike NGOs, NIMBYs can adopt contentious tactics that exert considerable pressure on local officials to open participatory channels. Both envi...

Governance for sustainable development requires new approaches to governance that go beyond the government versus market debate. Negotiated agreements and other new policy instruments have become quite popular in environmental governance, although not without debate. Based on the official evaluation of the Dutch system of environmental negotiated agreements, two central questions are answered. What is the degree of success (criteria for effectiveness, efficiency and positive side effects for learning and flexibility) of the use of negotiated environmental agreements in the Netherlands, and to what background factors is the degree of success related? What role is played by follow-up implementation after the agreements are signed and what is the interaction with other instruments? The assessment of the negotiated agreement as an instrument of environmental governance is generally positive.

For 15 years the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED) has given advice to the Chinese government on various aspects of environmental conservation. In 2004, the Council established a Task Force on Environmental Governance, consisting of six international and six Chinese experts. On the basis of a thorough comparative evaluation of the structures, processes and outcomes of the environmental policies in China, the US, Japan and the EU, in November 2006 the Task Force presented its report consisting of 25 major recommendations, which are documented here in a condensed version.

This article examines the concept of governance states in relation to environmental politics in Madagascar. Governance states can be regarded as a new development in North–South relations. The concept denotes a move towards the politics of post-conditionality, where states are defined as ‘stakeholders’ and drawn into ‘partnerships’ with global public–private networks. This article uses Madagascar as a case study through which to examine the politics of post-conditionality. In particular, it examines the politics of environmental governance through complex networks of actors, especially international environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the World Bank. It focuses on how such transnational networks deeply affect conservation policy-making within Madagascar in particular, and the developing world more generally. It examines the complex and increasingly close relationships between states in the developing world, global environmental NGOs and the World Bank. It argues that such rela...

Much has been made of the environmental dark side of China's economic boom. Public health challenges, large-scale migration and diminishing economic opportunities are all costs incurred by China from the country's failure to integrate environmental protection and economic development successfully. Now China's leaders are attempting to use the country's transition to a market economy and integration into the global economy to help protect the environment, advancing policies such as green gross domestic product, tradable permits, environmental leadership by multinationals and national environmental model cities. The success of these policies, however, rests on a broader and more fundamental set of institutional reforms that would promote transparency, rule of law and official accountability, and thus remains in question.

This article examines three critical perspectives in green political theory arguing that environmental governance is emerging as an increasingly scientised and technocratic domain. These are contrasted with work under the banner of 'civic expertise' proposing increased citizen deliberation and participation in the scientific realm to reverse the technocratic features of environmental management. Eco-feminism links the rise of technocratic science to an overall critique of modernity, rationality and patriarchy. Eco-modernism aims at re-configuring scientific rationality in terms of reflexive modernisation, and a stronger participatory dimension of civil society. In the postmodern green critique, the ascendancy of regulatory science marks the influence of biopower or green governmentality. Civic expertise is advanced as a middle ground between these contested appraisals of science in modern societies. This is underpinned by a post-positivist account of scientific knowledge and promotes a reform of the scien...

Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance edited by Clark A. Miller and Paul N. Edwards (Politics, Science and the Environment Series). Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Pr...

Central and East European (CEE) states are implementing sweeping environmental policy reforms as they gain EU membership. This concluding chapter draws attention to key arguments in the volume and elaborates on four key themes that enrich conventional notions about Europeanisation and challenge prevailing views about the impacts that CEE states are having on environmental quality in an enlarged EU: the importance of capacity limitations and efforts to address them, the pesence of mixed messages and conflicting EU priorities, the importance of non-state actors, and the need for multi-directional exchange of ideas and information. These themes suggest, among other things, that EU officials and programs are capable of greatly improving some areas of environmental policy in CEE countries even as they make some areas of policy and societal behaviour less sustainable. This essay includes discussions of some possible ramifications of a larger EU for global environmental governance and some lessons from the 2004 ...

This contribution examines the potential impact of eastern enlargement on EU environmental governance. Whereas some observers see eastern enlargement as a potential threat to EU environmental governance, this contribution argues that it should be seen as an opportunity to intensify ongoing reform efforts. This view is based on three main premises. First, enlargement is likely to have a differential effect on the three governance regimes which together constitute EU environmental policy. Second, the threat that enlargement poses to one of these regimes is in fact already producing reactions that may allow the regime to continue to operate in the context of an enlarged EU. Third, enlargement may reinforce emerging shifts among the regimes, which answer to the larger challenge of sustainable development.

Adopting a multi-level governance approach, this article explores the interactions between the international CBD regime, the European Union and the member states in relation to biodiversity conservation policy. The European Community signed the UN Convention on Biodiversity in 1992. Between 1993 and 1998 EU biodiversity policy was ad hoc. The 1998 Biodiversity Strategy provides a more strategic response. Early biodiversity conservation efforts were hampered by member state persistent non-compliance with key legislation. Increasingly, however, collective action is the norm, being driven by the functional logic of nature conservation and by the institutional logic of the CBD. However, collective action is none the less constrained by the EU system of environmental governance. The result is a structural stress, which has the cumulative effect of enhancing the complex interdependencies that exist between these multilevel actors.

In recent years most industrialised countries have adopted 'new' environmental policy instruments (NEPIs) voluntary agreements, environmental taxes, tradable permits and eco-labels. This collection examines the current pattern of use over time (that is, 1970-2000) in eight industrialised countries. This introduction defines a NEPI and introduces the two main objectives of the whole collection, which are to: (1) identify where and when NEPIs are being used, and reflect upon the main drivers of (and barriers to) their continuing uptake, especially in Europe; and (2) assess how 'new' they actually are in comparison to the traditional style, structures and content of national environmental policy. The aim here is to assess how far NEPIs are actually replacing or simply supplementing 'old' instruments, namely regulation. By offering a fresh perspective on the comparative politics of NEPIs, this collection provides an important empirical test of whether government is giving way to a system of environmental governance, in which the level of central steering by the state is much reduced.

The popularity of 'New' Environmental Policy Instruments (NEPIs) has prompted widespread claims that contemporary environmental policy is undergoing a deep seated and long lasting revolution, characterised by a shift from environmental government to environmental governance. This study compares the adoption of NEPIs in the eight case study countries. It reveals that there are common drivers of change, but that the resulting pattern of use is highly differentiated across instrument types and countries. Very few countries are actually innovating in the way they use NEPIs; in most countries, certain types of NEPIs are either not being used or are being used but in a relatively incremental and evolutionary manner. These patterns of change are related to popular theories of comparative politics and public policy. It is concluded that a close empirical analysis of how NEPIs are actually being deployed in different national contexts, suggests that environmental governance is at best supplementing environmental government, not comprehensively supplanting it.

This article examines recent developments in participatory environmental governance under the neo‐liberal regime of Australia. The farmer‐based Landcare movement is representative of this tendency towards participatory environmental governance. At the same time, extensive and rapid rural restructuring has typified a neo‐liberal approach to the economy over the past decade. In seeming contradiction to the ‘new right’ economic project, forms of participatory management of rural environments have been allowed for, and indeed promoted by state and federal governments. Through an analysis of the development and implementation of these participatory programs, we show how neo‐liberal reforms can be enabled, supported and legitimated through forms of local ‘bounded’ democratisation and participatory rhetoric. We argue that these arrangements, deployed at localised, economically deregulated rural sites, constitute new forms of regulation that attempt to develop the entrepreneurial conduct of subjects. In the absen...

A framework is presented for thinking about state intervention in developed capitalist economies in two domains: social policy and environmental policy (and, within that, climate-change policy). Five drivers of welfare state development are identified, the ‘five Is’ of Industrialisation: Interests, Institutions, Ideas/Ideologies, and International Influences. Research applying this framework to the postwar development of welfare states in the OECD is summarised, distinguishing two periods: up to 1980, and from 1980 to 2008. How far this framework can contribute to understanding the rise and differential patterns of environmental governance and intervention across advanced capitalist states since 1970 is explored, before briefly comparing and contrasting the determinants of welfare states and environmental states, identifying common drivers in both domains and regime-specific drivers in each. The same framework is then applied to developments since 2008 and into the near future, sketching two potential con...