State and Environment: The Comparative Study of Environmental Governance

1 Introduction: The Comparative Study of Environmental Governance

1 Introduction: The Comparative Study of Environmental Governance Andreas Duit Global environmental change is threatening prosperity and well-being in developed and developing countries alike, and environmental management is now considered a core area of state responsibility in most countries . Indeed, many states now devote substantial proportions of their public spending to environmental monitoring, protection, and restoration , and many have developed considerable administrative, institutional, regulatory, and legislative capacities in the environmental area. In spite of this expansion of regulatory capacity, society´s efforts are far from sufficient for reversing, or even just slowing, the ongoing processes of environmental degradation. It is generally recognized that mitigating the ecological crisis must entail a reorganization of the social and political world on par with the previous great transformations, such as the emergence of the nation state system, the market economy, liberal democracy, or the welfare state. Reflecting the ongoing transformative process of the nature-society relationship is the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of subdisciplines in social science focusing on environmental issues. In contemporary political science, the study of environmental politics, natural resource management, and environmental policy is a well-established part of the discipline, complete with subfields ranging from international to local political scales, and from large-N cross-sectional studies to green political theory. As a result, significant progress has been made in the understanding of environmental governance. In particular, advances have been achieved in the areas receiving most attention in recent years—that is to say, research focused on subnational and supranational scales in which scholars have analyzed patterns of institution building, policymaking, and regime formation in international arenas (Meyer et al. 1997; Young 1999; Bäckstrand 2008; Paterson 2009), or questions of local or regional policymaking and the role of institutions and stakeholder participation 2 Andreas Duit in resource management (Ostrom 1990; Agrawal and Gibson 2001; Ostrom 2005). In the meantime, however, environmental governance on the meso level connecting macro and micro levels—the state—has been largely overlooked by social science. As Barry and Eckersley point out, this neglect of the state is, at least in part, linked to its contested role in green political thinking (Barry and Eckersley 2005). The state has been criticized on several accounts, most of them well known to students of and actors in environmental politics. The first point of critique has to do with the perceived inadequacy of the state as a type of political organization for dealing with problems on a global scale (Biermann and Dingwerth 2004). Most processes of environmental degradation are paradigmatic examples of truly globalized problems that individual states are thought to lack both the ability and the incentive to address, which has spurred both researchers and environmentalists to turn to the global arena in search for solutions to the environmental crisis. A second criticism focuses on the linkages between capitalism and electoral democracies. As the familiar argument goes, representative democracies, due to electoral pressures, will tend to promote economic growth, tax revenues, or employment opportunities whenever these conflict with environmental protection. Thus, we can only expect the state to supply a basic level of environmental regulation compatible with sustained economic growth (Buttel 2004). In a similar vein, the liberal democratic state has also been criticized for not allowing civic society and social movement representatives access to environmental decision- and policy-making processes, thereby restricting the representation of nature, as well as those groups in society which depend the most on their natural environment for their livelihood (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008). In addition, a heavily “scientized” political discourse within the framework of liberal democracy tends to marginalize views and standpoints not compatible with paradigms of sustained growth or technocratic forms of reasoning (Bäckstrand 2004). Another argument against the state is that liberal democracy has a strong tendency to prefer short-term over long-term gains, especially when long-term gains imply some sort of short-term reduction of well-being (Underdal 2010). Finally, critics have argued that the state’s foremost tool—public administration—is, due to its reliance on control-and-command management templates and an hierarchical and expert-dominated organization, inadequate for managing complex and unpredictable ecosystems (Holling and Meffe 1996) as well as for responding to the demands of citizens and stakeholders (Durant et al. 2004). Introduction 3 Bringing the State Back into Environmental Governance In light of this fairly long list of complaints lodged at the state, why should it...