Environmental Governance

What is Governance in this Context?

Governance describes how social activity is rule-bound and socially regulated. James Rosenau defined [Page 274]governance broadly as effectively functioning regulation mechanisms, devoid of formal authority, in a field of activity. This reflects the fact that governance is increasingly provided by a spectrum of nongovernmental market, civil society, and supranational organizations in addition to the ongoing key role played by nation-states. The governance literature increasingly recognizes both governing mechanisms that do not rest on recourse to the authority and sanctions of government and the shifting negotiation of responsibilities between the state and civil society.

Environmental governance can be provided by the state (as regulatory control), through the market (as a price mechanism) or by civil society, generating norms and expectations backed by moral sanctions. In reality, there is a great deal of intersection between each of these categories because markets rarely operate without some form of regulation and civil society increasingly plays a key role in state-based regulation.

At both national and international level, the traditional approach to environmental governance has been characterized by top-down, command-and-control mechanisms that prescribe targets for reducing pollution and employ state sanctions to secure compliance with them. Most of the high-profile global environmental regimes employ this approach, including the international ozone and climate regimes, even if they increasingly rely on market mechanisms to achieve the goals they set for themselves. For example, the Montreal Protocol, the centerpiece of the ozone regime, restricts trade between those countries party to the agreement and those that are not, and the Kyoto Protocol contains the possibility of an emissions trading scheme where carbon entitlements are traded in the marketplace. State-based environmental regulation, in general, however, has been subject to sustained criticism from key development actors such as the World Bank on the grounds that it is excessively inflexible, inefficient, and often ineffective at delivering the change in behavior that it intends. Therefore, increasing attention has been paid to voluntary and market mechanisms that are said to capture the potential of markets to produce environmental gains in a more efficient and cost-effective fashion.

Shifting Patterns of Governance in a Context of Globalization