Environmental Governance at the Core of Statecraft: Unresolved Questions and Inbuilt Tensions

The state is not only a main environmental player, but its involvement in environmental regulation has major consequences for the dynamics of statecraft. Environmental governance is the expression that better summarises the ongoing transformations of state interventions and the search for more flexible, adaptive approaches. A growing body of scholarly work has tried to establish the connections between the failures of environmental governance and the wider commitments of the state. What is largely missing in those studies is the synergy between environmental governance and the statecraft model put forward by Hegel in the early period of the industrial, liberal capitalism. Recent environmental policies have been particularly influenced by the Hegelian constitutional theory, especially considering the pursuit of legitimacy and flexibility. Consequently, the central challenge for geographers and other scholars of environmental governance is still to identify the changes in the rationale and configuration of the state apparatus and relate them to the wider political ecology of state action.