Conceptualizing Global Environmental Governance: From Interstate Regimes to Counter-Hegemonic Struggles

Governance has become one of the key themes in global environmental politics (GEP). Much of the strength of the concept derives from its capacity to convey a sense of an overarching set of arrangements beyond the specificities of individual issue areas or thematic concerns that encompasses a broad range of political foci. Governance as a concept also connects GEP to more general patterns of global politics. It does this not only by showing how broader global political forces and trends shape GEP (narrowly understood), but also how the environment is increasingly central to the institutional arrangements governing global life.

However, there is still great variation in how the term global environmental governance (GEG) is used. In the inaugural issue of Global Environmental Politics two sets of themed articles explored the general patterns of governance in GEP. There were, however, important differences between them in terms of what GEG was taken to be. In one set, the debate focused on whether an overarching World Environmental Organization is needed. ¹ As a green version of the debates surrounding the Commission on Global Governance, GEG here is taken to mean a programmatic, reformist orientation to the institutional arrangements in global politics, principally the UN system. Such a conception of GEG informed the run up to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD, Johannesburg, 2002), with a ministerial-level group meeting on precisely this question; how to reform the UN machinery to deliver more effective environmental governance. In debates within this group, governance was expressed in terms of concerns about the fragmentation of existing environmental agreements into different issue areas, lack of sufficient authority to enforce compliance, and lack of coordination of the various environmental governance mechanisms. ²

By contrast, three other articles in the issue dealt with the theme of "globalization and resistance." ³ Here there is a distinctly different notion of GEG involved. From this critical political economy perspective, GEG can be seen as a product of two phenomena: the pursuit of neoliberal forms of globalization; and the resistance to such centralization of power. In the former mode, neoliberal globalization involves the centralization of power to a mix of public and private organizations such as transnational corporations (TNCs), the WTO, the G7, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), or the World Economic Forum. ⁴ Environmental questions are a key part of legitimizing such a project, with neoliberals keen to display their environmental credentials through organizations such as the Business Council for Sustainable Development or via the promotion of innovative governance mechanisms such as emissions trading. ⁵ But at the same time such governance is deeply problematic in environmental terms and is increasingly resisted across the world, in part because of such problematic aspects. There is thus also a "governance from below" comprising both direct protests against institutions such as the World Bank or WTO, and the myriad of diverse activities by NGOs and social movements attempting to shape TNC practice and to regulate their power directly.

These are clearly very different ways of thinking about what we mean by GEG, and there is also a range of other conceptions. The intention of this special issue of Global Environmental Politics is not to decide between these differing conceptualizations. Rather, we bring together articles which reveal this diversity but at the same time collectively show the various ways in which GEP is increasingly at the heart of governance mechanisms and practices in global politics more generally.

Definitions and Interpretations

The different conceptualizations of GEG, both here and elsewhere, cannot be explained simply as alternative interpretations or explanations of a generally agreed phenomena. Rather the different approaches to the triad of concepts ("global," "environmental," "governance") understand the meaning of these terms in fundamentally different ways. There are thus differences in what the phrase governance is taken to mean.

A standard argument is to contrast governance with government, as emphasized...