Global Environmental Governance Reconsidered

11. The Changing Role of the State

11 The Changing Role of the State Daniel Compagnon, Sander Chan, and Ayşem Mert Devoting a chapter to the role of the state in global governance in a book focusing mainly on nonstate actors and governance beyond the state might be unusual. Is it necessary once more to bring the state back in (Mol 2007), and for what purpose? The valid critique of the overstated centrality of the state in classical international relations theory—in the realist and the liberal traditions—should not lead us to support the opposite and perilous assumption that the state as a concept has lost relevance in governance theory. Private governance is not altogether a new reality if one thinks about the British and French royal-chartered companies of the colonial era, with their quasi-governmental authority over wide territories, or private regulatory institutions of the nineteenth century such as The Universal Postal Union. Yet, the state has been the sole unit of analysis in most studies on international relations until the late 1990s. Now that global governance studies have emphasized the role of nonstate or nonpublic authorities and platforms (Barnett and Sikkink 2008), it is time to explore the remaining role of the state. There is a particularly strong case for reassessing the role of the state in the area of environmental governance. On the one hand, the fast development of various private governance initiatives (Pattberg, this book, chapter 5) is a potential challenge to the power and legitimacy of the state as the main source of global environmental policies. On the other hand, private authority and transnational governance rely on the international state system for legal frameworks of operation and normative foundations. This does not suggest that the state contrives to its own demise but merely that the new forms of governance are intrinsically hybrid (Falkner 2003), enjoying some support from state actors to operate effectively. Moreover, the state is still perceived by nonstate actors as a prominent decision maker that they strive to influence, and a key broker between international regimes and between global and 238 Daniel Compagnon, Sander Chan, and Ayşem Mert domestic policy domains. Thus, taking stock of the role of the state in the midst of the transformation of global environmental governance seems justified and important. Although the role of the state remains central (Lake 2008), it has largely been transformed. The functions that states perform and their influence in environmental policy making have been altered by a multidimensional globalization process and the multiple initiatives and demands from nonstate actors.The role of the state is not necessarily less important because of these processes (Vogler 2005). It is on face value an increasingly popular form of collective governance: from only seventy internationally recognized states in 1949, we have now reached two hundred states, 192 of them with UN membership. Why would political actors favor the state if it were devoid of power in today’s world affairs? Simultaneously , this number suggests various types of statehood, a fact that receives little attention in governance studies because of the sustained legacy of realist theorizing. In fact, governance studies neglected the implications of the growing differentiation between empirical expressions of statehood, taking the largely mythical Westphalian ideal type for granted. This chapter aims to fill this lacuna by focusing on the relationship between increasingly private-led governance and the changing roles of states. To do this, the next two sections focus on the two paradigmatic changes, one internal and one external to the discipline of international relations: first, we focus on deviations from the fictitious Westphalian model derived from the OECD countries’ historical trajectory and explore the so-called emerging economies and areas of limited statehood in the South. The latter are as much overlooked in the governance literature as they are in international relations research. Then, we explore the most dramatic change in global governance that transformed the role of the state: globalization. We do not propose here a Weberian typology of states but we point at different forms of statehood, which are present to some extent in the various contemporary states. The differentiation in state models and the impact of globalization are then illustrated in the following section. The main lessons on the changing role of the state will be drawn in a third section, keeping in mind the various forms of statehood , before a succinct concluding section. Conceptualization Regime theory with its sophisticated but somewhat decontextualized debates on conditions of interstate cooperation and the definition of [52...