Transparency in Global Environmental Governance: Critical Perspectives

3 The National Context for Transparency-Based Global Environmental Governance

3 The National Context for TransparencyBased Global Environmental Governance1 Ann Florini and Bharath Jairaj As is true for all of global governance, the rules of global environmental governance may be negotiated transnationally, but in a world of sovereign states they are implemented nationally. Even rules arrived at by transnational private sector self-regulation will play out in national contexts that vary wildly in the degree to which they are hospitable to transparency. In other words, global governance initiatives do not float free of the state system. Absent some degree of transparency-friendly institutions within countries, global transparency systems have little hope of success. The uptake and efficacy of disclosure-based systems depend heavily on the degree to which norms and practices of transparency are institutionalized at the domestic level. Since the early 1990s, there has been an extraordinary transformation in transparency views and practices in numerous countries around the world. Such changes have occurred in rich countries and poor, democratic and authoritarian (Florini 2007), driven in part by the democratization and marketization trends discussed throughout this book, but also by processes of transnational learning. This growing domestic receptivity to transparency-based governance provides the crucial context for understanding how the transparency transformation is unfolding in global environmental governance and what its potential and limits might be. Thus, as a complement to the subsequent chapters in this book, which focus on global transparency measures, the focus here is on the extent to which disclosure has been embraced at the national level and why, how it functions in distinct national circumstances, and to what effect. In particular, we aim to provide insights into the largely unexplored terrain of national transparency discourse and practices in some of the world’s emerging powers, with special attention to China and India. 62 Ann Florini and Bharath Jairaj Embracing Transparency At the national level, transparency policies generally emerge first in the form of broad right-to-know or freedom-of-information laws or regulations , often—but not always—accompanying broader processes of democratization . In democracies, these come about based on the fundamental democratic premises that public (government-held) information is by definition the public’s information and that governmental accountability requires transparency. In the oft-quoted words of one of the framers of the US Constitution, former US president James Madison: A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. (Madison 1822) Such laws and regulations are important precursors to the more targeted disclosure-based systems of environmental governance that are the focus of subsequent chapters in this book. In the absence of some basic acceptance of right-to-know principles somewhere in the political system, it is implausible that there would be widespread adherence to the more demanding requirements of disclosure-based regulation or governance. This notwithstanding, more targeted “regulation-by-revelation” rules are also arising as responses to regulatory voids at the national level, paralleling what is happening at the transnational level. Since the 1980s, governments have privatized not only state-owned companies but also the provision of a vast array of what are usually considered public goods (from prisons to electricity to basic education and water).2 Such processes of privatization and marketization require, but have not always fostered, new national regulatory mechanisms to ensure that public goods continue to be provided and that externalities generated by private businesses are appropriately managed. Thus, just as the globalization of production has created regulatory voids that the global environmental governance initiatives described elsewhere in this book try to address, the increased reliance on the private sector has created regulatory voids at the domestic level as well. Moreover, the globalization of production by multinational corporations has permitted supply chains to penetrate deep into developing countries, including into those with less regulatory capacity than the home countries of these corporations.3 In addition, the globalization of finance has led to a growing reliance on disclosure systems to attract foreign direct investment (such as the International Monetary Fund fiscal The National Context 63 transparency standards).4 The global transparency initiatives described in this book reflect multiple efforts to bridge governance gaps in the environmental arena. Yet such initiatives remain dependent on national preferences and implementation capacity, a...