State and Environment: The Comparative Study of Environmental Governance

Preface

Preface This book grew out of a conviction that the study of environmental politics has much to gain from rediscovering two central features in general political science: the state and the comparative method. In scholarship on environmental issues in recent years, the role of the state in addressing environmental problems has been overshadowed by a focus on smallscale natural resource management, green norms and behavior among citizens, and international environmental treaties and regimes. In fact, one could argue that with few exceptions, students and practitioners of environmental policy and politics have looked everywhere but to the state in search of solutions for looming environmental disasters. The studies collected in this volume all illustrate the continued and pivotal role that the state can play in contemporary environmental dilemmas. As many commentators have pointed out before, solutions that the state offers to environmental problems are often incomplete, insufficient, and biased toward continued economic growth rather than long-term sustainability . Nevertheless, there are two reasons why the state deserves a spot in the analytical limelight. The first is that over the last four decades, most states in industrialized countries have developed extensive administrative and regulatory responses to environmental problems. Policies to protect the environment have been issued, and administrative structures for environmental policy implementation, monitoring, and knowledge generation have been erected. The driving forces behind this regulatory expansion, as well as cross-country variations, remain poorly understood and require more scholarly attention. The second reason why this development is analytically relevant is that although this process has been slow, gradual, marked by setbacks, and far from sufficient in halting environmental degradation, it is also the most comprehensive response issued to environmental problems by society writ large, dwarfing the environmental efforts of markets, international xii Preface organizations, and individuals in both scope and impact. As such, this process of regulatory and organizational growth in the environmental area is an important object of study for the purpose of assessing society’s ability to address environmental problems. Analyzing issues and hypotheses in political science by systematically comparing the differences and similarities among countries lies at the heart of a discipline in which true experimental designs can be applied only to a limited extent. The comparative method in political science rests on the idea that cross-national variations can be exploited to investigate the causes and effects of a wide range of political phenomena. Perhaps as a consequence of the simultaneous appearance of environmental problems in most industrialized countries in the 1960s, the comparative method has a long history in the study of environmental governance. By building on this tradition and adding a systematic comparative approach, this volume not only hopes to advance research on environmental matters, but also to enhance our knowledge of more general questions regarding the limits and possibilities of human governance in overcoming large-scale problems. ...