Transparency in Global Environmental Governance: Critical Perspectives

Preface

Preface As this book goes to press in late 2013, Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency “whistleblower,” is suspended in limbo in Russia, unable to make his way out; and the geopolitics of surveillance versus transparency (and its consequences for diplomacy, human rights, national sovereignty, and global security) is front-page news everywhere. Debates rage about whether Snowden is a traitor or a hero for revealing that the United States is engaged in covert surveillance of its own citizenry, the citizenry of other countries, and of (friendly and not so friendly) governments worldwide. In light of these revelations, the need for transparency to disclose what the powerful are doing, and to hold them to account, seems ever more urgent. Yet, even as the practices of surveillance are routinely condemned, its counterpart, transparency, is not necessarily the panacea that it is made out to be.This is so whether transparency is about the practices of surveillance (as with Snowden’s revelations) or about national security threats, the practices of war and diplomacy, financial and economic relations, or even (relatively more benignly) about the environmental performance of different powerful actors. This book explores the claim that transparency is not a panacea by addressing the workings of transparency and disclosure in the global environmental and sustainability realm. Although transparency has always been front and center in certain domains of international relations, its power and its promise to effect desired changes in global sustainability governance is only now receiving more attention. This edited book thus explores the phenomenon of “governance-bydisclosure ” in global environmental governance. It has its genesis in a Forum article in the journal Global Environmental Politics (GEP) in 2008, in which one of us suggested that transparency was a curiously understudied phenomenon in our field, even though it was becoming an x Preface increasingly ubiquitous element of global environmental governance arrangements . The article claimed that the existence and nature of a “transparency turn” in global environmental governance merited more scrutiny than it had received to date. The editors of GEP proactively solicited two additional Forum contributions to engage with this claim. Taken as a whole, this Forum debate outlined the contours of an emerging research agenda in this field. For this, our first debt of gratitude goes to the editors of GEP at the time, Jennifer Clapp and Matthew Patterson, for helping to stimulate a fruitful initial debate on this topic within the pages of the journal. It seemed logical to follow this up with a more extended in-depth comparative analysis of the role of transparency in the global environmental domain. This we did through a GEP special issue in 2010, which brought together a group of senior and early-career global environmental governance scholars to (re)examine their specific environmental issue areas through a transparency and disclosure lens. This edited book extends this line of research much further. It undertakes a wide-ranging (comparative) analysis of diverse areas of global environmental governance, in which transparency and information disclosure play a key role. It deploys, as starting hypotheses, some of the central findings of the GEP special issue and subjects these to further empirical and comparative analysis. It includes fourteen contributions, including three context-setting conceptual treatments of transparency in governance and ten empirical examples of governance by disclosure. Four of these draw on the earlier GEP special issue articles, yet each one has undergone a significant metamorphosis in order to engage with the specific analytical framework advanced in this book. Two of the short GEP commentaries are also included in this book, yet now as full-length research contributions. Supplementing these are eight new chapters written exclusively for this book. In the journey toward this edited book, we have incurred a number of important debts. First, we would like to thank the European Union Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action on “Transformations in Global Environmental Governance” for providing funding support to host two author workshops to present various iterations of our transparency research. The first was held at Wageningen University, the Netherlands , in May 2009, and the second at the London School of Economics and Political Science in September 2011. For serving as discussants in the Wageningen workshop, we thank Frank Biermann, Kristine Kern, Kris van Koppen,Arthur Mol, and Jan van Tatenhove; as well as Hilde Toonen Preface xi for her enthusiastic organizational support. For the London workshop, we acknowledge useful feedback on book...