Governance via persuasion: environmental NGOs and the social licence to operate

The ‘social licence to operate’ (SLO) concept is increasingly associated with environmental activism in nations with prominent resource extractive industries. Environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) deploy it as a campaigning strategy to contest corporate activity, in particular, the environmental sustainability of existing or planned commercial projects. Drawing on two prominent Australian ENGO campaigns – against Seafish Tasmania’s Abel Tasman vessel and Tassal’s proposed fish farm operations on Tasmania’s east coast – the SLO strategy is assessed in the context of the governance literature, arguing that it constitutes ‘governance via persuasion’, a mode that incorporates appeals to normative values. Australian SLO campaigns are primarily directed at the state, promoting opportunities for ENGOs to shape reviews and revisions to environmental regulation alongside governmental and corporate actors. SLO campaigns are therefore a contemporary expression of environmental strategies seeking regulatory change in contrast to ENGO-led private governance initiatives that often bypass the state.     

Environmental policy innovations in China: a critical analysis from a low-carbon city

The Chinese state is squarely ‘back’ in the business of environmental governance with an increasing number of policy innovations or experiments to resolve environmental issues. These have been mostly enacted through the ‘experimentation under hierarchy’ framework, undergirded by compensation-for-performance incentive structures for local agents. Based on on-site ethnography in local China, a critical analysis is presented of low-carbon city policy experiments – one of the most prominent environmental policies introduced in the past decade. Using lessons from the agency theory, it is hypothesized that outcomes of these policy innovations are contingent on different policy dimensions. Although a number of positive outcomes have been achieved in output-oriented dimensions, the fundamental difficulty of specifying all aspects of complex, multidimensional work tasks involved in low-carbon city development has frequently led to policy unmaking. The findings raise important questions about China’s tendency to rely excessively on compensation-for-performance structures to promote environmental policies.     

Globalization’s limits to the environmental state? Integrating telecoupling into global environmental governance

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.     

The power of environmental norms: marine plastic pollution and the politics of microbeads

Emerging environmental norms gain strength and diffuse more quickly when scientific evidence of harm is consolidating, when activism is intensifying, and when political and corporate resistance is relatively weak. The anti-microbead norm – that plastic microbeads should be removed from personal care products – has been gaining global influence since 2012; witness the upsurge in anti-microbead activism, public concern, voluntary corporate phasedowns and governmental bans. By 2018, the world was on track to eliminate microbeads from ‘rinse-off’ products within a decade, reducing microplastics flowing into oceans by 1–2%. This confirms the power of environmental norms, but how and why this phaseout is occurring – unequally across jurisdictions, with firms creating loopholes, missing deadlines and limiting the scope of reforms – also reveals innate weaknesses of bottom-up, ad hoc norm diffusion as a way of improving marine governance. These weaknesses are heightened when economic stakes are high, solutions are complex and costly, authority is fragmented across jurisdictions and corporate resistance is strong.     

The politics of curtailment: multi-level governance and solar photovoltaic power generation in China

The rise of China’s photovoltaic (PV) industry, and the concomitant curtailment problem, provides an opportunity to reconsider China’s industrial governance. It is argued here that the curtailment is intertwined with the multi-level character of China’s energy governance. Borrowing the insights of multi-level governance (MLG), we identify the relevant stakeholders situated at different levels and clarify their positions and considerations concerning the solar PV industry. MLG analysis reveals that curtailment in China’s solar PV industry was primarily the result of uncoordinated development at different levels – sub-provincial, provincial, national, and international. China’s response to the curtailment problem is then examined, considering whether such policy adjustments will contribute to greater societal participation, changes in development ideas, an improved coordination mechanism, or alternative institutional arrangements.     

Simulative governance: on the collaborative narrative of civil society participation in the CDM stakeholder framework

The Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is often cited as an exemplar of new, hybrid forms of global environmental governance operating at the public–private interface. Practically, enacting this arrangement involves a wide range of non-state actors. This broad involvement is here assumed to mark a shift towards more polycentric and networked modes of governance in which agents collaborate as ‘stakeholders’ in the process of consensual rule-setting and implementation. Using post-political critique, the depoliticising effects of the stakeholder framework on civil society actors are interrogated, using formal and informal participation opportunities to raise concerns regarding specific CDM projects. The analysis suggests that the CDM’s collaborative narrative of stakeholding structurally fails to stimulate public (re)engagement and is, instead, a prime example of simulative governance that struggles to achieve the simultaneity of two incompatibilities: the participatory revolution and the post-political turn.     

What makes for good and bad neighbours? An emerging research agenda in the study of Chinese environmental politics

Tackling China’s grave environmental problems increasingly turns on questions of sub-national interjurisdictional relations. What are the conditions under which neighbouring localities cooperate in stewardship of the natural environment? What factors give rise to interjurisdictional conflict such as pollution spillovers? Through a combination of empirical and theoretical reflections, a research agenda to better understand these issues is outlined. First, China’s recent innovative approaches to the promotion of interjurisdictional cooperation are examined. An in-depth case study of interjurisdictional ecological protection ‘redline’ zones underscores the difficulties of inculcating environmental neighbourliness between local governments. Yet, a precise diagnosis of the problem remains elusive because too little is known about the underlying drivers of interjurisdictional relations in China. An analytical framework that draws insight from contemporary China studies and comparative environmental governance scholarship is offered for the study of interjurisdictional environmental relations in China.     

The four faces of the environmental state: environmental governance regimes in 28 countries

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.     

What room for politics and change in global climate governance? Addressing gender in co-benefits and safeguards

Questions of equity, gender, power and rights are central to environmental justice in climate mitigation schemes such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions From Deforestation and Degradation). Drawing on the ideas of co-benefits and safeguards, the strategies for challenging mainstream discourse on gender in REDD+ – from the outside and within – are examined of two organisations that have attempted to bring a political concept – gender – into the largely technical discourse of climate policy. The analysis points to the risks of co-option that women’s organisations face, trying to challenge and change the mainstream discourse on gender in climate policy-making. The need for diverse and flexible strategies for resistance and influence in order to seize opportunities that may arise in countering the depoliticising force of global climate governance are highlighted.     

Leadership and lesson-drawing in the European Union’s multilevel climate governance system

ABSTRACT

The important role that climate leaders and leadership play at different levels of the European Union (EU) multilevel governance system is exemplified. Initially, climate leader states set the pace with ambitious policy measures that were adopted largely on an ad hoc basis. Since the mid-1980s, the EU has developed a multilevel climate governance system that has facilitated leadership and lesson-drawing at all governance levels including the local level. The EU has become a global climate policy leader by example although it had been set up as a ‘leaderless Europe’. The resulting ‘leadership without leader’ paradox cannot be sufficiently explained merely by reference to top-level EU climate policies. Local-level climate innovations and lesson-drawing have increasingly been encouraged by the EU’s multilevel climate governance system which has become more polycentric. The recognition of economic co-benefits of climate policy measures has helped to further the EU’s climate leadership role.     

Social representations of governance for change towards sustainability: perspectives of sustainability advocates

There is a substantial body of literature on public understandings of large-scale ‘environmental’ phenomena such as climate change and resource degradation. At the same time, political science and economics analyse the governance arrangements to deal with such issues. These realms of research rarely meet: there has been little research into people’s understandings of the governance of environmental change. This study adds a psychological perspective to governance research by investigating social representations of governance that promotes societal change towards sustainability, and related practices. It examines data from qualitative interviews with sustainability-interested people in seven European countries (n = 105). The analysis identified building blocks of representations suitable as an analytical framework for future research on governance representations. The diversity of their content reflected a range of pathways to societal change. Representations often seemed to have a creative function as a guiding vision for individuals’ own practices, but their wider transformative potential was constrained.     

The European Council,the Council and the Member States: changing environmental leadership dynamics in the European Union

ABSTRACT

The leadership dynamics between the European Council, the Council and the Member States in European Union (EU) environmental policy since the 1970s are analysed. The puzzle is that, although the EU was set up as a ‘leaderless Europe’, it is widely seen as an environmental leader, albeit sometimes as a one-eyed leader amongst the blind. While differentiating between leadership types, it is argued that the European Council has the largest structural, the Council the most significant entrepreneurial, and the Member States the most important cognitive and exemplary leadership capacities. Most day-to-day environmental policy measures are negotiated by the Environment Council (in collaboration with the European Parliament). The European Council’s increased interest in high politics climate change issues is largely due to the EU’s global leadership ambitions. Member States have traditionally formed environmental leadership alliances on an ad hoc basis although this may be changing.     

The territorialization of transnational sustainability governance: production,power and globalization in Iceland’s fisheries

To contribute to the literature on transnational sustainability governance hybrids, a new fisheries certification program in Iceland that was originally developed as an alternative to the non-governmental Marine Stewardship Council is examined. While this new program appears on the surface to constitute a purely nationalistic reaction against external non-state authority, the new governance institution is also non-governmental and incorporates international norms and institutions. To explain this new governance hybrid, Robert Cox’s International Political Economy approach to production and power is engaged. This approach theorizes the co-constitution of the social forces of production, state–society complexes and global governance. It is argued that the Icelandic case is not entirely localized or unique; it is part of a broader movement in which social forces of production respond to new market-oriented transnational sustainability governance institutions by developing territorially embedded but transnationally legitimate alternatives.     

Green states in Africa: beyond the usual suspects

Whilst the ‘green state debate’ has primarily focused on a narrow range of usual suspects in the developed world, the debate can be enriched and challenged by considering more diverse cases. Viewing African states from a green state perspective invites empirical reassessment of the geographical scope of the concept, and introduces a new set of conceptual questions about the political significance of transitions in environmental governance. Ecological modernisation theory has largely neglected African states because it is assumed that African states are weak, failing, or failed, and that environmentalism is a post-materialist phenomenon. Whilst both assumptions can be challenged empirically, a biopolitical perspective on the African environmental state, drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, can both position African state development within a longer-term context and challenge some assumptions of ecological modernisation. Examples from Egypt, South Africa, and the Kavango-Zambezi Trans-frontier Conservation Area highlight underestimated continuities in environmental state practices. The international and transnational drivers of the green state in Africa are emphasised, as well as the political dangers of a green ‘state building’ project.     

Addressing concerns about climate policies: the possibilities and perils of responsive accommodation

Responsive accommodation is a political strategy that addresses concerns about a policy proposal by incorporating amendments that address those concerns. This approach can broaden the policy’s appeal, but is strategically risky, as it can alienate the policy’s base of support. We examine this strategy and its application in the politics of climate change. Using a novel survey experiment, relative public support is evaluated for two amendments to a carbon tax proposal – revenue neutrality assurances and a carbon tariff – designed to ease concerns about taxes and global competitiveness. Analysis shows that support for a carbon tax increases when coupled with a carbon tariff, but decreases among some of the policy’s supporters when described as revenue-neutral. These results suggest that policymakers using a responsive accommodation strategy must carefully weigh its possible risks and rewards in their particular context.     

De-Europeanising or disengaging? EU environmental policy and Brexit

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) has had a profound effect upon its members’ environmental policy. Even in the United Kingdom (UK), the EU’s most recalcitrant member state (historically labeled the ‘Dirty man of Europe’), environmental policy has been Europeanised. As the UK moves to the EU’s exit door it is timely to assess the utility of Europeanisation for understanding policy dynamics in the UK. Drawing upon interviews and extensive engagement with stakeholders, this article analyses the potential impact of Brexit upon environmental policy and politics. The analytical toolkit offered by de-Europeanisation is developed to identify the factors that drive and inhibit de-Europeanisation processes, thereby providing insights that may be applicable in other settings. Disengagement and policy stagnation are presented as more likely environmental outcomes of Brexit, with capacity emerging as a central explanatory variable.     

Environmental policy evaluation in the EU: between learning,accountability, and political opportunities?

ABSTRACT

Policy evaluation has grown significantly in the EU environmental sector since the 1990s. In identifying and exploring the putative drivers behind its rise – a desire to learn, a quest for greater accountability, and a wish to manipulate political opportunity structures – new ground is broken by examining how and why the existing literatures on these drivers have largely studied them in isolation. The complementarities and potential tensions between the three drivers are then addressed in order to advance existing research, drawing on emerging empirical examples in climate policy, a very dynamic area of evaluation activity in the EU. The conclusions suggest that future studies should explore the interactions between the three drivers to open up new and exciting research opportunities in order to comprehend contemporary environmental policy and politics in the EU.     

Renegotiating nature in the Anthropocene: Australia’s environment movement in a time of crisis

The Anthropocene raises two interrelated problems for the Australian environment movement. The first concerns the movement’s normative and political relationship to non-human nature: climate change in particular is forcing an urgent reconsideration of how nature is to be understood and managed. The second problem concerns the implications of full recognition of the rights of First Peoples for environmental justice. These issues may lead to crises of identity, legitimacy, and effectiveness for the Australian movement. The normative bases upon which Australian environmentalists may draw in order to ‘protect nature’ in the Anthropocene are discussed. Setting aside the simple emancipatory ambition of preservationist environmentalism and the Australian movement’s earlier Romantic protectionism, a new pragmatic, pluralistic environmental politics – based on precaution, the avoidance of pain and suffering, and protection of the most vulnerable – is suggested.     

Conceptualizing energy democracy

‘Energy democracy’ epitomizes hopes in energy transformation, but remains under-defined, a political buzzword rather than a real concept. After presenting its activist roots and mapping its usage, ‘energy democracy’ is positioned in relation to similar normatively derived concepts: environmental, climate, and energy justice, and environmental democracy. Drawing on insights from political theory and political sociology, it is shown what is democratic in energy democracy. Referencing the question of experts and democratic publics in complex technological areas, the paper explains why it is desirable for energy governance to be more democratic. To show what is unique in ‘energy democracy’ beyond increased participation in energy policy, the prosumer is introduced as the ideal-typical citizen, highlighting the importance of the energy transition, the agency of material structures and a new emergent governmentality. ‘Energy democracy’ is conceptualized as an analytical and decision-making tool, defined along three dimensions: popular sovereignty, participatory governance and civic ownership, and operationalized with relevant indicators.     

The environmental state as a model for the world? An analysis of policy repertoires in 37 countries

Scholars have proposed the analytical concept of the environmental state, a state where government actively addresses negative environmental externalities of economic activities. The mapping of environmental regulatory expansion in Western countries has been central in recent attempts to identify the environmental state empirically. Surprisingly little is known, however, when it comes to the environmental regulatory expansions in non-Western countries. Are there similar trends towards the emergence of environmental states in the non-West as well? From analysing data covering 25 policies in 37 countries, it appears that regulatory expansion has also occurred in the non-Western world, and the distinction between the West and the non-West has been reduced over time. There are non-Western countries among environmental pioneers, and there is some evidence for the trend of global convergence. Future research on environmental states should take into account emerging environmental states in the non-West.