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Accountability and Legitimacy in Earth System Governance: A Research Framework
... Previous studies have singled out accountability as a particularly important aspect to consider when studying ICIs, as they complement and perhaps even challenge the authority and legitimacy of established international institutions (Hickmann, 2015;Kramarz and Park, 2019;Widerberg and Pattberg, 2017). The involvement of actors beyond national governments in global governance could exacerbate the challenge of securing accountability and legitimacy of global rule-making, not least because traditional means of doing so in a national context, such as electoral accountability and constitutional representation, are not applicable to state-led global rulemaking or private and hybrid forms of global governance (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). ...
... Accountability refers to the willingness to account for and to accept responsibility for one's action (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Mason, 2008). More specifically, accountability can be conceptualised as institutions outlining a set of (formal and informal) rules that define accountability relations, responsibilities and sanctions (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Chan and Pattberg, 2008;Keohane, 2003;Widerberg and Pattberg, 2017). ...
... Accountability refers to the willingness to account for and to accept responsibility for one's action (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Mason, 2008). More specifically, accountability can be conceptualised as institutions outlining a set of (formal and informal) rules that define accountability relations, responsibilities and sanctions (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Chan and Pattberg, 2008;Keohane, 2003;Widerberg and Pattberg, 2017). It is often thought of as a relational concept outlining linkages between a "principal" holding an "agent" to account (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Keohane, 2003;Kramarz and Park, 2016;Widerberg and Pattberg, 2017). ...
Protected areas are frequently used as an important governance approach for biodiversity conservation. Even though the total area of protected areas has increased over time, the coverage, quality of management and effectiveness of these areas are still suboptimal. A large body of literature identifies four main challenges that limit the effectiveness of protected areas: lack of stakeholder participation, insufficient organisational capacity to enforce rules, poor integration across social and ecological goals, and underdeveloped accountability mechanisms for assessing management procedures. To address these challenges, scholars and policymakers increasingly debate how to foster an integrated, inclusive, and transparent “whole of society” approach to conservation. We contribute to this debate by examining the role of international cooperative initiatives (ICIs), involving non-state and subnational actors operating across national borders to steer society towards a common goal. We identify 20 ICIs that work on protected areas and analyse their potential to address the four main challenges identified in protected areas, by examining their actor constellation, governance functions, goal alignment, and monitoring and reporting mechanisms. We find that ICIs working on protected areas have the potential to directly address challenges in protected areas related to lack of capacity and accountability mechanisms, and indirectly address challenges related to lack of participation and integration across goals. We discuss these findings in relation to scholarly debates in the global environmental governance and protected areas literature respectively, as well as, to policy debates over the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework within the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
... Vatn, Kajembe, Mosi, and Nantongo (2017) reasoned that legitimacy is of paramount importance in the process of establishing CBNRM and that it is vital that intended outcomes are achieved by following "acceptable standards." When processes of environmental governance lack transparency, this endangers legitimacy (Bernstein, 2004;Biermann & Gupta, 2011). We, therefore, argue that a lack of legitimacy and transparency (see below) in CBNRM and other natural resource governance processes can indicate attempts of accumulation by dispossession although national governments' and NGOs' rhetoric about such CBNRM projects insists on the contrary (Igoe & Croucher, 2007). ...
... Analytically, this study draws on Kelly (2011) and Levien (2017) who indicate that (a) dispossession may be a slow and continuous process that takes a long time to achieve the objectives of political and economic elites; (b) states are usually involved in legitimizing dispossession through the law, and (c) struggles of many forms including resistance to the state's actions frequently culminate into violence. Furthermore, to address legitimacy and transparency, the study draws on Bernstein (2004), Biermann and Gupta (2011), Gupta (2010aGupta ( , 2010b. Legitimacy means that "a decision is accepted by those concerned" (Gupta, 2010a(Gupta, , 2010bVatn et al., 2017). ...
... Moreover, the fact that communities complained that they had not been informed about the rules related to the establishment of the WMA, enabling them to make an informed decision about joining the WMA, indicates major deficiencies in input legitimacy (cf. Biermann & Gupta, 2011). Finally, we argue that the introduction of the concept of WMAs on August 19, 2003 followed by an "official" signature by Minjingu on November 30, 2003 agreeing to join Burunge CBO, is evidence of a rushed, and thus at odds with what might qualify as a participatory and legitimate, process. ...
Unfortunately, adverse rather than positive local welfare outcomes of
community-based conservation initiatives are quite common. Through the case of Burunge Wildlife Management Area (WMA) this study documents how WMAs in Tanzania appear designed to facilitate accumulation by dispossession in the name of decentralized wildlife management. Based on focus group discussions, interviews, and policy-document analyses, we show that the process of establishing the WMA was fraught with hidden agendas and lacked legitimacy as well as transparency. Villagers and their local governments were also oblivious to the fact that the village land they contributed to forming the WMA would no longer be under village control even if they withdrew from the WMA. Decentralized revenue streams were gradually recentralized, and when the High Court ruled in favor of a Village Government that did not want to be part of the WMA, higher levels of government scared it to stay and to drop its legal as well as economic claims. We conclude that by mechanisms of rule-through-law WMAs deliberately dispossess village communities by attenuating
the authority of democratically elected village governments. Hence, the wildlife policy needs urgent revision to democratize and thus promote positive livelihood outcomes of the WMA concept.
... Both dimensions are deviated from the normative premise that legitimate government has to serve the "common good of the respective constituency" (Scharpf, 2006). In addition, the dimension of throughout legitimacy highlights the procedural dimension of legitimacy (Dingwerth, 2007;Schmidt, 2013;Zürn, 1998), which is typically analysed from a perspective of accountability and transparency (Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Gulbrandsen, 2008;A. Gupta, 2014;Kramarz & Park, 2017). ...
... Thus, the ideal type of stakeholder democracy and the practice of stakeholder participation have become important legitimacy sources for transnational governance (Bäckstrand, 2006a). However, it remains an open question, who counts as an "affected" stakeholder (Biermann & Gupta, 2011). Dingwerth (2007) provided a concept to analyse and evaluate the democratic legitimacy of nonstate actors, which includes input and throughput legitimacy. ...
... Suchman defines legitimacy as: "a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions" (Suchman, 1995, p. 574). Here, scholars distinguish between 'internal' and 'external' legitimacy (Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Provan & Kenis, 2008). Internal legitimacy means the extent to which members (e.g. of a voluntary standard) accept the institution and how they evaluate the participation in the decision-making process and its performance. ...
In a time, when climate change impacts become increasingly visible and different policy responses are debated, this thesis explores what forms of market-driven climate governance have been considered to be legitimate and desireable (or not) by different stakeholders at the global and local level. Doing so, it critically interprets discursive struggles, which surround the market mechanisms under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement. Moreover, it provides a novel conceptual approach to analyse the discursive (de-)legitimation of transnational climate governance and thereby advances the theoretical fondations of sociological legitimacy. As from a governance perspective, non-state actors are considered to be key actors in the Kyoto and Paris regime, this thesis has analysed how the Gold Standrad - a prominent voluntary carbon standrad- has shaped the (de)legitimation of the carbon offset markets.
... Conceptually, our inquiry is about the democratic legitimacy of global policies, that is, the extent to which citizensincluding the poorcan discuss and decide the direction of global governance and hold decision-makers accountable. Democratic legitimacy is operationalized most prominently as input legitimacy, which refers to the inclusiveness of governance (B€ ackstrand, 2006;Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Scharpf, 1997Scharpf, , 1999, along with criteria of throughput and output legitimacy (Bursens, 2009;H€ oreth, 1999;Schmidt, 2006), relating to the accountability and effectiveness of governance arrangements (Haas, 2004;Nanz and Steffek, 2004). ...
... Legitimate procedural representation of the global poor would entail clear rules that allow civil society representatives speaking on behalf of the global poor to be accountable to these constituencies. Accountability we define here as the capacity of the global poor to exercise oversight and constraint on the activities of civil society representatives (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Keohane, 2003). ...
Global civil society is often uncritically seen as a democratic force in global governance. Civil society organizations claim to hold states and intergovernmental institutions accountable and channel the voices of the world’s poorest people in policy making. Yet to what extent do they succeed in performing that role? This article assesses the representation of the poor in global civil society, with a focus on the negotiations of the Sustainable Development Goals, a process widely hailed as one of the most democratic ever organized by the United Nations. We first analyse how the poor and their local representatives are procedurally included in global civil society (procedural representation). We then quantitatively assess the actual representation of civil society organizations from the world’s poorest countries in the civil society hearings of the SDG negotiations, where civil society was invited to speak on behalf of their constituencies (geographical representation). Finally, we evaluate the extent to which global civil society representatives who claim to speak on behalf of the poor legitimately represented the interests of these people (discursive representation). We found that global civil society fails to fully represent the poor on procedural, geographical and discursive terms, and eventually perpetuates postcolonial injustices in global sustainability governance. Will the now pervasive use of online videoconferencing promote active and democratic participation and representation of the global poor? The turn to online meetings makes reforms from the UN and civil society organizations ever more important and urgent in order to address new imbalances and to work towards true global and inclusive democracy.
... Finally, TNA participation in CoPs can enhance the legitimacy of the agreement by reducing the democratic deficit problem that emerges when shifting political decisionmaking processes from the national to the international level (Zürn, 2000(Zürn, , 2014. It is not then surprising that global governance scholars and policy makers call for 'opening up the intergovernmental system to institutionalized balanced involvement of non-state actors' (Biermann & Gupta, 2011, p. 1862. A statement by the UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1994 on the role of TNAs is illustrative: ...
... Yet, the literature highlights that legitimacy concerns motivate states to involve civil society actors in their governmental delegations to CoPs (e.g., Bernauer & Betzold, 2012;Böhmelt, 2013;Böhmelt et al., 2014). Consequently, the possibility exists that the inclusion of civil society actors in national delegations to CoP suffices to mitigate the 'democracy deficit' and enhance the legitimacy of global governance (e.g., Bernauer et al., 2020;Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Dryzek, 2012;Steffek & Ferretti, 2009). If so, then, any further independent engagement of such actors at the CoPs is not needed. ...
The stage in which countries formally decide on whether to participate in (i.e., ratify) international agreements is crucial to global governance efforts. The reason is that, by and large, international agreements with greater participation are more likely to contribute to effective problem solving. We study the role procedural design characteristics of agreements play in such decisions. Specifically, we examine whether treaties’ provisions allowing non-state actors to participate in treaty making, which is widely regarded as an important procedural aspect of governance, increases the likelihood of ratification. Our empirical testing relies on a new time-series-cross-sectional dataset that includes information on the ratification behaviour of 154 countries with respect to 178 multilateral environmental agreements in 1950–2011. We find that treaty provisions allowing for greater non-state actor access to the meetings of the parties indeed increase the likelihood of treaty ratification. The result is robust to controlling for the effects of various other treaty design characteristics and country characteristics on ratification behaviour. The main policy implication is that, despite occasional debate over drawbacks of involvement of non-state actors, the latter tends to support global environmental governance efforts and should be further enhanced.
... Two components of accountability -answerability and enforceability -are difficult to secure in a global governance context. The latter is particularly challenging (Biermann & Gupta, 2011). Answerability is related to a given actor (in this case, a state) providing justification for its actions and behaviours to another. ...
... Grant and Keohane (2005, p. 29) define accountability as a relationship wherein 'some actors have the right to hold others to a set of standards, to judge whether they have filled their responsibilities in light of those standards, and to impose sanctions if they determine that those responsibilities have not been met'. This definition implies several crucial components of an accountability relationship: it assumes that one set of actors is accountable to another; that this account-giving relates to agreed standards of performance; that it is possible to judge and assess if standards are being complied with; and that sanctions are possible if standards are not met (see also Biermann & Gupta, 2011). ...
Securing accountability of states for their climate actions is a continuing challenge within multilateral climate politics. This article analyses how novel, face-to-face, account-giving processes for developing countries, referred to as ‘Facilitative Sharing of Views’, are functioning within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and what these processes help to shed light on. We analyse the nature and scope of the ‘answerability’ being generated within these novel processes, including what state-to-state questioning and responses focus on, and what ‘performing’ accountability in this manner delivers within multilateral climate politics. We find that a limited number of countries actively question each other within the FSV process, with a primary focus on sharing information about the technical and institutional challenges of establishing domestic ‘measuring, reporting and verification’ systems and, to lesser extent, mitigation actions. Less attention is given to reporting on support. A key aim is to facilitate learning, both from the process and from each other. Much effort is expended on legitimizing the FSV process in anticipation of its continuation in adapted form under the 2015 Paris Agreement. We conclude by considering implications of our analysis.
Key policy insights
• We analyse developing country engagement in novel face-to-face account-giving processes under the UNFCCC
• Analysis of four sessions of the ‘Facilitative Sharing of Views’ reveals a focus on horizontal peer-to-peer learning
• States question each other more on GHG emission inventories and domestic MRV systems and less on mitigation and support
• We find that limited time and capacity to engage, one-off questioning rather than a dialogue, and lack of recommended follow-up actions risks generating ‘ritualistic’ answerability
• Such account-giving also intentionally sidesteps contentious issues such as responsibility for ambitious and fair climate action but may still help to build trust
• Much effort is expended on ‘naming and praising’ participant countries and legitimizing the process
... Furthermore, understanding justice in PA management is an emerging focus of research, although it is rarely integrated into PA assessment efforts (Zafra-Calvo and Geldmann 2020; Moreaux et al. 2018;Franks et al. 2018;Friedman et al. 2018;Biermann and Gupta 2011). Seeking to contrib ute to filling these research gaps, in this paper, we aim to assess the performance of the Río Negro National Park (RNNP) and its buffer zone in the Paraguayan part of the Pantanal (Figure 1) in terms of effectiveness and justice. ...
Protected areas are a fundamental element for the protection of ecological integrity and, in some cases, the livelihood of local communities worldwide. They are also embedded in socio-ecological systems, and their management is subject to various political, economic, and social influences. Good governance of protected areas is recognized as a decisive aspect of ecological conservation , which is at risk in institutional contexts where there is a weak scope of action alongside issues with misrecognition of key actors and their representation in procedures. In this context, the present study case aims to assess the performance of the Río Negro National Park governance system in terms of effectiveness and justice to enable the identification of strategies to improve this protected area governance system for the achievement of its desired outcomes. Using the social-ecological systems approach, this paper proposes an analytical framework for the performance assessment, including both the effectiveness and justice of the governance of socio-ecological systems, stemming from the socio-ecological justice framework. It uses mixed methods based on semi-structured in-depth interviews supplemented by a focus group discussion, participant observation, and secondary data analysis. Results show that the governance of Río Negro National Park is negatively impacted by low-capacity, a lack of human, financial, and technical resources, as well as the lack of recognition of the indigenous community of the Yshiro and the rural community as key actors, leading to a lack of representation of their interests, values, and knowledge in norm-making and decision-making processes. The findings unveil some windows for improvement through better-designed environmental policies specifically based on collective action and social learning. The results demonstrate that effectiveness and justice influence each other and, therefore, are deeply intertwined. From the assessment conducted, the paper highlights the components of the governance system that should be improved to achieve good governance of the protected area as a socio-ecological system, promoting the ecological integrity and the dignity of life (socio-ecological justice) of the individuals and communities that are part of this system.
... In the words of Louis Kotzé, ESL is 'an essential part of earth system governance, or "organized human responses to earth system transformation, in particular the institutions and agents that cause global environmental change and the institutions, at all levels, that are created to steer human development in a way that secures a 'safe' co-evolution with natural processes"' Kim, 2020, 464, referring to Biermann, 2007, 328) Although Kotzé and Kim have lamented that law has been a 'conspicuously peripheral part of [the] earth system governance agenda' (Kotzé and Kim, 2019), it is also true that ESG scholarship had been studying subjects of legal relevance well before ESL was coined, often from institutionalist perspectives, and had achieved multi-disciplinary integrations with multiple fields without it (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Biermann, 2014;Meisch, 2016). Thus, although ESL scholars sometimes explicitly see the task of ESL as undertaking legal research to advance the work of ESG (Hurlbert, 2022), the lack of a clear distinction between the two makes it difficult to discern what special contribution lawyers can make to Earth Systems discussions that can't or aren't already covered or addressed by other ESG scholars elsewhere. ...
This paper interrogates the vision and purpose of the nascent and developing field of ‘Earth System Law’ (ESL) with a view to asking how best to describe what ESL is and how it can contribute to scholarship on law in the ‘Anthropocene.’ Drawing on Luhmann’s autopoetic systems theory of law and complex adaptive systems theory, the paper reflects on ESL’s identity, boundaries, and role as a scholarly movement and seeks to draw out both the prospects and limits of its transformational purposes. Such questions are seen as inescapably tied to pragmatic considerations of how law and legal systems change, meaning that ESL would be best served if its scholars embraced a kind of ‘translating’ role to facilitate linkages between law and other domains in search of ways for earth systems considerations to be made relevant to law, rather than becoming vanguards of a normative legal revolution for the Anthropocene. (149 words)
... Tem um significado mais amplo do que a interpretação restrita do conceito de administração. A governança pública está relacionada à legalidade e legitimidade, além de valores comerciais estritos, sendo uma atividade complexa que envolve a direção de redes complexas em setores de políticas sociais (Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Kickert, 1997;Pallot, 2003). Bovaird e Löffler (2003) e Bovaird (2005) definem GP como as formas pelas quais as partes interessadas interagem umas com as outras para influenciar os resultados das políticas públicas. ...
Objetivo: Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo identificar como se desenvolveu o conceito de Governança Pública ao longo do tempo.
Método: Para tanto, realizou-se uma pesquisa bibliográfica, de caráter exploratório-descritivo em artigos científicos publicados em bases de dados. Ao final do levantamento, identificaram-se 81 artigos publicados em periódicos nacionais e internacionais alinhados às delimitações postas pelos pesquisadores.
Resultados: Autores importantes da área são identificados, como Jacob Torfing e Stephen Osborne. O trabalho deste último autor foi evidenciado como o mais citado. Notou-se que as pesquisas são predominantemente caracterizadas como revisão de literatura, seguidas de framework. Percebeu-se que o conceito de Governança Pública é multidisciplinar e tem-se desenvolvido dentro da mudança de três paradigmas da administração pública: a Administração Burocrática, a New Public Management e uma última e mais recente, reconhecida como a Nova Governança Pública.
Contribuições: Um conceito foi apresentado envolvendo ideais desses três paradigmas. Visualizou-se por fim, uma tendência de que as tecnologias têm se mostrado importantes no desenvolvimento recente do conceito da Governança Pública, principalmente por meio de movimentos como os Governos Abertos. Originalidade e relevância: A pesquisa é inovadora no que diz respeito a trajetória histórica do desenvolvimento do conceito de Governança Pública ao longo dos últimos anos, e de propor um conceito englobando os três paradigmas identificados na literatura.
... Inclusive governance also involves recognition of and respect for collective rights holders (Brondizio and Le Tourneau, 2016;IPBES, 2019b), such as indigenous peoples and local communities, including women, young people and various small-scale producers. The inclusive approach is not aimed at participation itself, but at ensuring that the equality, appropriation, transparency and legitimacy that results from participation is present throughout the process (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;De Castro, Hogenboom and Baud, 2016). ...
This report analyses ten grounded experiences from Latin America using the IPBES proposed governance framework for transformative change. The experiences described show that territorial, human-rights based and transdisciplinary approaches towards biodiversity lead to its conservation while strengthening the sustainability of local livelihoods.
... La gobernanza inclusiva también involucra el reconocimiento y respeto de quienes ostentan derechos colectivos (Brondizio y Le Tourneau, 2016;IPBES, 2019b), como los pueblos indígenas y comunidades locales, las mujeres, juventudes y diferentes tipos de productores/as de pequeña escala. El enfoque inclusivo no tiene como fin la participación per se, sino asegurar a lo largo de todo el proceso la equidad, apropiación, transparencia y legitimidad que resulta de la participación (Biermann y Gupta, 2011;De Castro, Hogenboom y Baud, 2016). ...
Este reporte analiza diez experiencias de América Latina utilizando el marco propuesto por IPBES para el cambio transformativo. Las experiencias descritas demuestran que los enfoques territorial, basado en los derechos humanos y transdisciplinario de la biodiversidad conducen a su conservación y al fortalecimiento de la sustentabilidad de las estrategias de vida locales.
... 3. Regarding food systems, further inquiries are needed not only to understand how diversified food systems themselves are interconnected across space and scale (Hebinck et al., 2021a;Boillat et al., 2020), but also to understand how the effects of interventions across scale and space can be 'measured', 'known' or otherwise made tangible, and how accountabilities for (absence of) interventions beyond direct spatial jurisdictions can be understood and acted upon. Promising in this regard could be for transition scholarship to more thoroughly engage with literature on global earth system governance (with an important role for international treaties and multi-stakeholder partnerships, see e.g., Pattberg and Widerberg, 2016;Biermann et al., 2012), especially in relation to how accountability and legitimacy can be strengthened (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). 4. Further inquiries into how cross-scale, multi-sited and multi-level interventions can be designed, implemented and supported, as well as investigating when and how the 'span of connectivity' starts to impede the 'span of control', might help catalyze transformative governance. ...
... In scholarly literature, inclusiveness is defined broadly and in relation to other concepts, such as participation (Okereke and Agupusi 2015;Stiglitz 2002), democratic legitimacy (Bäckstrand 2006;Biermann and Gupta 2011;Scharpf 1997), inclusive development (Gupta and Vegelin 2016) and justice ). Democratic legitimacy is generally understood as the extent to which citizens can influence the content of norms and agreements and hold decisionmakers accountable; inclusiveness covers here a political dimension (Nanz and Steffek 2004). ...
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project.
... In scholarly literature, inclusiveness is defined broadly and in relation to other concepts, such as participation (Okereke and Agupusi 2015;Stiglitz 2002), democratic legitimacy (Bäckstrand 2006;Biermann and Gupta 2011;Scharpf 1997), inclusive development (Gupta and Vegelin 2016) and justice . Democratic legitimacy is generally understood as the extent to which citizens can influence the content of norms and agreements and hold decisionmakers accountable; inclusiveness covers here a political dimension (Nanz and Steffek 2004). ...
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... In scholarly literature, inclusiveness is defined broadly and in relation to other concepts, such as participation (Okereke and Agupusi 2015;Stiglitz 2002), democratic legitimacy (Bäckstrand 2006;Biermann and Gupta 2011;Scharpf 1997), inclusive development (Gupta and Vegelin 2016) and justice ). Democratic legitimacy is generally understood as the extent to which citizens can influence the content of norms and agreements and hold decisionmakers accountable; inclusiveness covers here a political dimension (Nanz and Steffek 2004). ...
Written by an international team of over sixty experts and drawing on over three thousand scientific studies, this is the first comprehensive global assessment of the political impact of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched by the United Nations in 2015. It explores in detail the political steering effects of the Sustainable Development Goals on the UN system and the policies of countries in the Global North and Global South; on institutional integration and policy coherence; and on the ecological integrity and inclusiveness of sustainability policies worldwide. This book is a key resource for scholars, policymakers and activists concerned with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, and those working in political science, international relations and environmental studies. It is one of a series of publications associated with the Earth System Governance Project. For more publications, see www.cambridge.org/earth-system-governance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... Partnerships are considered to transform the system of actors and rules around the issues they address (Abbott and Snidal 2009;Andonova 2017;Faul and Tchilingirian 2021a;Trujillo 2018), external actors' issue-framing and prioritization (Harman 2016), as well as their adoption of partnerships as a mode of governance or implementation (Robertson et al. 2012). Partnerships may also influence other governance mechanisms and cooperation processes in the wider ecosystem into which the partnership is introduced (Abbott, Green and Keohane 2016;Andonova 2017;Auld, Renckens and Cashore 2015;Biermann and Gupta 2011;Söderbaum 1999;Stone 2008). ...
... Theories drawing towards the environmental democracy end of the scale, tend to suggest that liberal democracy would be better at generating sustainable development if existing institutions were reformed and if capitalism incorporated environmental values to a larger degree and expanded participatory governance. Theoretical perspectives drawing towards ecological democracy instead tend to set out a more fundamental critique of all liberal-democratic environmentalism and often advocate agendas that are considerably more transformative, participatory, cosmopolitan, and ecocentric (Agyeman et al., 2016;Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Kramarz and Park, 2016;Pickering et al., 2020). In this more recent normative literature, we also find suggestions for issuespecific forms of democracy, such as carbon democracy where it is argued that the rise of modern democracies is entwined with the development of fossil fuel industries, making it difficult to decarbonize existing democracies (Mitchell, 2011) and energy democracy concerned with discovering pathways to the normative goal of democratizing energy production and consumption (Szulecki, 2018). ...
Since a more substantial recognition of environmental degradation in the 1960s, the scholarly community has looked at democracy with mixed feelings. Some assert that democracy is devastating for the environmental performance, some claim the opposite, while others suggest that certain democratic models are more successful than others in paving the way for sustainability. Both political theorists and empirical scholars add fuel to this debate, and neither has settled the argument yet. In this paper we make use of recently collected data from the Varieties of Democracy project on different conceptions of democracy and address both these literatures. We empirically test whether different features of democracies, i.e., liberal in its thinner understanding, social-liberal, and deliberative, are more or less beneficial for environmental commitments. We investigate which of these features make democracies more prone to produce environmental policy outputs – adopt climate laws, deliver on them, develop stringent environmental policies, and incorporate sustainability into economic policies. We find that democracies with stronger deliberative features adopt more, but not necessarily stricter or more effective, environmental policies. Instead, democracies with stronger social-liberal features adopt both stricter and more effective policies.
... Indeed, in their study into the diverging conceptualizations and operationalizations of 'justice' in GEG scholarship, Dirth et al. (2020) emphasize that this sub-field in environmental scholarship engages with a rich but complex vocabulary. Key concepts include, but are not limited to, justice, equity, and fairness (e.g., Dirth et al., 2020), access and allocation (e.g., Gupta & Lebel, 2010), and accountability and legitimacy (e.g., Biermann & Gupta, 2011). ...
Research on global climate change governance is no longer primarily concerned with the international legal regime, state practice and its outcomes, but rather scrutinizes the intricate interactions between the public and the private in governing climate change. This broad trend has also taken center stage within the pages of INEA. Two decades after its establishment, we sketch the main theoretical debates, conceptual innovations and empirical findings on global climate change governance and survey the new generation of climate governance scholarship. In more detail, we sketch how climate governance research has developed into three innovative sub-debates, building on important conceptualizations and critical inquiries of earlier debates. Our aim is not so much to provide an all-encompassing assessment of global climate change governance scholarship in 2022, but rather to illustrate in what important ways current research is different from research in the early phase of INEA, and what we have learned in the process. First, we discuss scholarship on the bottom-up nature of climate governance, developing from earlier ideas on agency beyond the state and the transnationalization of governance arenas. Second, we review contributions that have more systematically engaged with the concept of governance architectures, resulting in a stimulating new academic debate on the characteristics of complex governance systems and the consequences of governance complexity and fragmentation. Third, we note a distinct normative turn in global environmental scholarship in general and global climate governance in particular, associated with question of access, accountability, allocation, fairness, justice and legitimacy. The assessment of each of these debates is centered around questions of effective and legitimate climate governance to counter the climate emergency. Finally, as a way of concluding, we critically reflect on our own scholarly shortcomings and suggest a modest remedy.
... The success of specific policy, law, or regulation governing land concessions can serve as a precondition for public acceptance. Governance mechanisms are often legitimized if the public perceived fairness in their objectives and established norms(Owen and Kemp 2014;Biermann and Gupta 2011). This is considered as output legitimacy which is relevant in corporate and public governance(Mena and Palazzo 2012;Curtin and Meijer 2006)). ...
Post-war Liberia has experienced a wave of large-scale land agricultural concessions in recent years. In principle, the goal is to transform rural livelihoods and promote economic growth through jobs creation and infrastructural development. However, those large-scale land concessions have not met the expectations of job creation and economic empowerment. Instead, public reactions to those concessions operations have threatened the peace and stability of the state. The disenchantments engulfing concession plantations in the country can be attributed to many factors, ranging from economic, environmental to social. Many authors have reflected on these issues, not enough studies have focused on the strategies and modes of design and award of these concession agreements. This study explored state-investors strategies in the design and award of concession contracts which led to continued protestations and conflicts between local communities and the concessionaries.
The research focused on the agricultural land concession between Government of Liberia
and the Malaysian-based Sime Darby Plantation Liberia (SDPL). It argues that the concession lacks public support because the State ignored basic principles of good governance in the design and award of the concession agreement. To substantial my argument, I adopted qualitative method to gather the perspectives of stakeholders on the concession design and negotiation. I further used four principles of good governance to analyse the findings in line with relevant literatures. The conceptual framework used in this study presents the four dimensions as: participation, transparency, accountability, and legitimacy. These dimensions are based on what is require in the Public Procurement and Concession Act (PPCA) of Liberia. The Findings indicate that not adhering to these principles in concessions arrangement can have negative implications on the relationship between local communities and Concession Companies.
... Accountability, as a mechanism, is considered as the practice whereby a fellow is obligated, by virtue of the position he occupies, to elucidate the activities engaged in to an individual or a group of individuals given the authority to give verdict on the activities of the 'obligated-fellow' as well as render adequate and appropriate commendation for the activities. Biermann and Gupta (2011) posit that the theory of accountability prevails on the four components of accountability processes: (i) the normative component, the behaviour considered the norm and characterised by satisfactory meticulousness; (ii) the interactive component which considers the relational circumstance where those saddled with an accountable position relate to those empowered to request for account; (iii) the judgmental component which considers the decisions of those entrusted with responsibility of demanding for stewardship on expected outcome, whether there is deviation from the norm or not; and lastly (iv) the behavioural component which considers that deviation from the acceptable norms by accountable officers to be sanctioned by actors of the system. For the process of accountability to be completely meaningful, there is a need for all the components to be visible in appropriate measure. ...
The dire need to concentrate emphasis on, and increase the revenue of a nation, particularly from sources that are within her control, necessitated this study. The study submitted that, if governments are perceived to be accountable, more citizens will voluntarily pay their tax obligations. The perception that government is accountable lowers the necessity for coercion and costs of tax collection and improves revenue from taxation. Government accountability was proxied by corruption perception index (CPI) while tax revenue was represented by the total tax revenue generated by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) from 1995 to 2020. Objectives of this study were to ascertain the relationship between government accountability and tax revenue, and to determine their causal relationship. The OLS estimation and Granger causality test were used in the analysis. The study revealed that there is no significant predictive relationship between government accountability and tax revenue; and that neither taxation granger causes government accountability nor government accountability granger causes tax revenue. The study found that, in Nigeria, tax obligations are not voluntarily complied with; instead, taxpayers are compelled. When government unaccountability is greeted with the slightest form of civil disobedience, all manner of coercion is applied to citizens. The study recommended the construction of the institutional facility and systems with political legitimacy to generate revenues from citizens.
... Moreover, legitimacy is important in relation to access to or distribution of resources, which may become a central issue in the Anthropocene. The increasing complexity and uncertainty connected to the Anthropocene pose a whole new range of challenges for legitimacy in law and governance, while at the same time increasing the need for legitimacy and accountability in order to be more effective, in terms both of process and of problem solving (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). Hence, the role of law for resilience must be analysed both in terms of its role in the governance of ecosystemsits problem-solving capacity, directly related to the environment (ecological resilience)as well as in its procedural capacityits role for governing society and creating justice (social resilience). ...
... Literature in critical transparency studies has grown around the transparency turn in environmental governance (Gupta & Mason, 2014) and the notion of 'governance by disclosure' (Gupta, 2008;Biermann & Gupta, 2011). These concepts support the idea of governance structures being (re-) designed to facilitate information and they characterize how information production is meant to steer behaviour. ...
This article-based thesis examines the role of auditing and auditors in the FSC certification scheme as a form of informational governance in action. The thesis draws on practice theory, critical transparency- and critical auditing studies, and dramaturgy in its theoretical underpinnings. The main body of the thesis is two empirical articles bookended by two literature-based articles. The introduction and conclusion chapters result in six total chapters. The main body begins with a published article examining the ways in which auditing of the environment is characterised in literature, highlighting the importance of transparency, effectiveness, and objectivity. The article argues that these values actually characterise a spectrum of modes of auditing with “professionalism” on one end and “protest” on the other. It also argues that a more grounded examination of auditing in practice in the context of this spectrum would benefit understanding how audits are performed and why they are performed as they are, resulting in a more critical examination of the values expressed in literature. The second article examines the content of an FSC lead auditor training course that the candidate attended twice. The focus of the article is on the value of objectivity as imparted to and practiced by the auditors-in-training. This value is at odds, however, with the equally important value of interpretation that is also stressed in the training. As a result, auditors are expected to manage this tension in order to demonstrate mastery of the subject of auditing. The third article is a dramaturgical analysis of ethnographic observations of a FSC forest management audits in Spain and Africa, wherein auditors demonstrated their mastery not in the classroom, but in the field. The focus of the article is on how auditors, separately and together with auditees, enact their role to perform a good audit in order to make the chaotic reality able to be accounted for (account-able) in order to ensure that the end result is clear in what happened and who is responsible (accountable). This article explicitly situates auditing practices closer to the “professionalism” end of the spectrum described previously, and highlights the consequence of valuing this mode of auditing (ensuring high account-ability) being a risk to the overall goal of FSC certification (ensuring accountability for forest degradation). The final content chapter examines the tension that occurs when universal normative requirements (such as FSC’s standards and procedures) are enacted in a context, and the alignment that happens in order for the scheme to continue functioning. Furthermore, the article argues that this cycle of friction and alignment is in fact necessary for the continued operation of such schemes. This is done by examining examples of friction and alignment at different spatial and organizational levels in FSC’s scheme. The concluding chapter of the thesis critiques informational governance as an example of “epochal thinking” and highlights how considering themes of governance by disclosure and the tyranny of transparency ground the discussion in how and why informational governance happens as it does. It goes on to point out that the mode of auditing employed by auditors inherently contains certain values, and those values impact which information is made available to which audience, and that those values are in no way natural or inevitable. They are chosen and perpetuated in practice. Having a mode of auditing with values that do not match the values of the certification scheme may very well lead to perverse outcomes. Finally, it argues for the value of using dramaturgy to examine ethnographic studies of the environment due to its versatility, practice-based nature, and its expressly neutral conception of actors at the outset of the analysis.
... Some authors have studied the factors conditioning effective (mostly formal) participation of non-state actors, including Indigenous representatives (for more detailed findings regarding the Arctic region see Coote, 2016). Most authors argue that increasing non-state actor participation enhances the legitimacy of international institutions by increasing transparency in political decision-making processes, by fostering democratic representation, and by providing specialized expertise (Albin, 1999;Bernauer & Gampfer, 2013;Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Green, 2013). Some more critical authors stress that non-state actors should also be considered as advocates of specific group interests (Prakash & Gugerty, 2010). ...
Our research addresses knowledge integration for the good governance of the environment and the oceans: (a) through a comprehensive legal, political science, and anthropological analysis; and (b) by providing an examination of crucial research foci and research gaps in the fields of environmental and marine governance, along the North–South divide. Our subsequent critical synopsis reveals how existing research within each discipline offers complementary insights for future research. We concludes with a call for further testing of tools, approaches, and methods to enable comprehensive research on the conceptualization of knowledge integration.
... The key feature of all those arrangements is co-governance among public and private actors in order to regulate specific issue arenas, while new instruments are often tried to foster public-private collaboration, stakeholder participation and regulatory innovation: for example walk-in evenings in city halls, deliberative fora, joint fact-finding meetings, start-ups of universities and companies, citizens' assemblies to inform governments, collaborative design shops, focus groups, serious games, living labs and so on. Often, these new structures and styles are considered progress in regulation, or are evaluated positively in the scholarly literature, in that they do potentially increase both performance and legitimacy of governance processes (which I like to refer to as the Chloris of late-modern governance) (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Hogl et al., 2012;Van Kersbergen and Van Waarden, 2004). ...
Many forest-related problems are considered relevant today. One might think of deforestation, illegal logging and biodiversity loss. Yet, many governance initiatives have been initiated to work on their solutions. This Element takes stock of these issues and initiatives by analysing different forest governance modes, shifts and norms, and by studying five cases (forest sector governance, forest legality, forest certification, forest conservation, participatory forest management). Special focus is on performance: are the many forest governance initiatives able to change established practices of forest decline (Chloris worldview) or are they doomed to fail (Hydra worldview)? The answer will be both, depending on geographies and local conditions. The analyses are guided by discursive institutionalism and philosophical pragmatism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
... This win-win narrative is linked to the issue of support-worthiness: the effectiveness of international agreements depends on whether that agreement is perceived to be legitimate among core constituencies (Andresen and Hey 2005;Biermann and Gupta 2011). If actors affected by environmental decisions are given a chance to influence the rule making process, policy objectives are then likely to reflect norms that are perceived as legitimate, which will in the end lead to more stringent compliance. ...
How do governance arrangements affect perceptions of legitimacy and effectiveness amongst non-state actors? This is a pertinent question as the roles of non-state actors have been strengthened in global climate governance. In this paper, we focus on how actors involved in climate governance processes perceive trade-offs and specific factors that risk undermining legitimacy and potential effectiveness of those arrangements. We argue that different rules of procedural legitimacy generate sociological views about whether an institution or its policies will be effective and, in turn, are ‘worthy of support’. To establish this, we engage in an analysis of how nonstate actors have been engaged in the UNFCCC, pre- and post-Paris. We find that efforts to deepen engagement is generating contestation between actors, not fostering collaboration. Focusing on how actors view procedural rules and their potentialities for effective outcomes sheds light on support for those institutions and the development of effective policies.
... It addresses the perceived validity of decision-making authority and how this authority itself is established (Bernstein, 2004) and is thus one parameter through which power dynamics can be made explicit. Perceived legitimacy is important in relation to the sustainability of agricultural innovation because it increases the acceptability of, and support for, the innovation processes and outcomes (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Lockwood et al., 2010). ...
Innovations have the potential to help us address and overcome many of the challenges that agriculture is facing today. Yet, at the same time, they have the potential to create new, sometimes even more challenging, problems, especially when they are not governed in a sustainable way. Governing agricultural innovation sustainably requires understanding of all components that influence, and are influenced by, innovation processes, interactions across societal levels, and the normative and power dynamics that come together to shape the direction and outcomes of innovation processes. Hitherto, approaches to (agricultural) innovation and transition tend to specialize on a specific societal scale or sub-aspect of innovation or transition processes. In this article we aim to bring the strengths of some of the main approaches (Multi-Level Perspective, Agricultural Innovation Systems, Responsible Innovation, Innovation Management, Theory of Planned Behaviour) and insights from environmental governance literature together into a comprehensive framework. The framework describes seven key components and their interactions: macro context, governance system, immediate context, innovative and adaptive capacity of the actors, psychosocial factors, and the innovation process itself. Based on these, we present a subset of guiding questions that can be used diagnostically or for design purposes to support the sustainable governance of agricultural innovation processes.
... Institutional outcomes and local bricoleurs' evaluation and feedback also play a major role in reshaping and reinventing institutional legitimacy, as institutions continuously evolve and adapt in the process of implementation (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Esty, 2006;Suchman, 1995). Unlike tradition and established authority that pre-exist an institution, its outcomes will justify or undermine the institution retroactively. ...
The emergence and development of diverse institutions is an important yet understudied subject in community-based irrigation governance. Drawing on empirical evidence gathered from 30 administrative villages located in the upstream Yellow River, northwest China, this paper builds on the theoretical perspective of institutional bricolage and adopts an interpretative approach to examining diversity, legitimacy and the persistence of different institutional modalities in the case-study area. It is shown that monocentric, polycentric, bureaucratic and individualised institutions emerge and co-exist in a relatively small area and have been sustained by various sources of legitimacy. Moreover, the process of legitimisation is heterogeneous, as the various institutional modalities have drawn their legitimacy from different sources. These may be both internal and external, synthesise and contradict simultaneously, and change as the irrigation institutions initiate, operate and evolve. The findings connect irrigation institutions with everyday practices, which are non-linear and uncertain, thus bringing about a more nuanced understanding of institutional bricolage and offering more in-depth explanations for the puzzles of why institutions demonstrate different characteristics in similar contexts and why some institutions persist when faced with challenges and tension.
... Accountability promotes cooperation and mitigates free riders and defection (Tetlock, 1992). Accountability may be to a Minister, a manager, a committee, board, members, shareholders, or to the public (present and future) (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). Chen et al. (1998) distinguished between individual and group-based accountability. ...
The Paris Agreement called for voluntary cooperation between firms, NGOs, and the state, to meet global climate goals. This study examines the development of voluntary carbon projects (VCPs) in Iceland – a country aiming to be carbon neutral by 2040. There is little empirical evidence on what catalyzes voluntary and inter-organizational climate cooperation. To fill this gap, we use a mixed methods research design, surveying firms to understand their awareness and commitment to VCPs, and interviewing state and non-state actors involved in VCPs. In interviews, we tested a cooperation framework with six ‘levers’ to enable cooperation: a superordinate goal, group identity, trust, accountability, communication, and reward distribution. Individualist and collectivist cultural dynamics influence these mechanisms. Survey results showed a general awareness of and support for VCPs, but concerns around their robustness. In interviews, the six cooperation mechanisms offered structured pathways for enabling and strengthening VCPs.
... If not based on accepted forms of authority, political power and peoples' rights to vote within constituencies and jurisdictions, landscape governance requires other sources of legitimacy. These could be direct representation, a greater role for non-state actors, and collective action across jurisdictional boundaries -which in turn raises new legitimacy issues (Bekkers and Edwards, 2007;Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Mees, 2014). The proposition of securing legitimacy in landscape governance therefore needs to be redefined as requiring more direct involvement of stakeholders , without threatening the sovereignty of elected governments and blurring public and private interests (Sørensen 2005;Mees, 2014). ...
... As recent scholarship suggests (cf. Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Kraft and Wolf, 2018;Sareen and Haarstad, 2020), accountability analysis can take us beyond analysis of socioecological imperatives, shifting values, and idealized conceptions of mechanism design that dominate sustainability debates. ...
What constitutes a sustainability transition? We identify sustainability transitions as premised on shifts in accountability relations – assessments of conformance with institutional controls coupled with application of sanctions, incentives, and subsidies – which structure the selection pressures that shape future demographics, technical practices, and social and material trajectories of an economic sector or domain. Contestation and adaptation of accountability mechanisms lend themselves to empirical observation. Beyond evaluating institutional changes that might support a sustainability transition, our analytic framework positions us to identify incoherent, hollow and regressive modes of accountability that constrain sustainability transitions. To operationalize our conceptual scheme, we analyze a purported case of sustainability transitions, solar energy in Portugal during the period 2017–2020. This empirical analysis juxtaposes the promise of movement to a more equitable, low-carbon energy future with institutional and material inertia. We draw on expert interviews, field observation and secondary research to apply accountability analysis to this energy transition case. We find evidence of shifts in relations of accountability that bode well for accelerated growth of solar uptake in Portugal. More broadly, this pilot application of an analytic framework for studying relations of accountability shows significant promise for advancing environmental governance research.
... The lack of involvement of these stakeholders could also result in a conflict of interest (Biermann and Gupta, 2011). Since reporting of monitored and quantified emissions reduction have to be on a national scale, this means that there will be a conflict of interest between participating stakeholders (Korhonen-Kurki et al., 2013;Ochieng et al., 2015;Rosa da Conceição et al., 2018). ...
Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries is considered an efficient and lowest-cost measure to mitigate climate change. Organizations like The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), helps resolve essential challenges like availability/use of technology, administration, human capacity and low capacity to measure and quantify national forest carbon emission reductions from Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). This study assessed Nigeria’s progress in implementing the requirements for monitoring and quantifying forest carbon stock in the context of REDD+. This study was through a case study research where national and international REDD+ documents on MRV were reviewed and analyzed. The results showed that Nigeria had an average ranking score for the establishment of administrative/institutional capacity; however, they ranked low both in its ability to acquireand make available essential technical tools/methods; and in the adoption of REDD+ ethical governance principles. This study shows that the nation had made considerable efforts in establishing administrative/institutional capacity even though unable to acquire relevant technological methods/capacities, competence, expertise, and incorporate REDD+ good governance practice in MRV implementation.Findings of this study shows that high-order technical methods (e.g., remote-sensing and satellite land monitoringsystem-SLMS) are not freely available due to lack of financial capacity to acquire these tools. This study also reveals that there is low collaboration with communities and other key actors/stakeholders in the REDD+ MRV process. This study suggests that international organizations should lend support through the transfer and provision of technical tools/methods relevant for MRV, and this should be supplemented with training to develop vital capacity/skills for MRV. Also, Nigerian REDD+ administrative institution should encourage active inclusion and participation of all stakeholders, particularly, the local communities in its MRV implementation; their involvement will not only improve the monitoring and measurement of forest carbon stocks but will help in early identification of potential threats to the success and sustainability of the program.
... The recent rise in references to accounting may be in response to what a number of environmental governance scholars call a "legitimacy crisis" in environmental governance (Auld and Gulbrandsen, 2010;Buchanan and Keohane, 2006;Corbera et al., 2007;Jepsen, 2017). Biermann and Gupta (2011) argue that governments and NGOs face questions about their role and ability to address pressing environmental problems. These organizations are seen to exercise fiscal muscle and adopt radical practices but operate without much check and balance. ...
Multiple centers of authority in hybrid forms create conditions of radical openness where questions of value and fitness are in flux. Environmental accounting is suggested as a condition for steadying hybrid forms and opening up possibilities for institutional innovations. This paper advances a critical social science analysis of environmental accounting to help specify how, when, and in what ways strengthening accounting capacity advances hybrid governance. Social studies of accounting argue that accounting systems are contingent on institutions: rules and social conventions, not only data or science. Our practice-centered analysis of two cases of building environmental accounting tools to advance high profile institutional innovations in US agri-environmental governance finds that the systems of rules that structure and legitimize accounting protocols are not pre-given. The same radical openness that presents opportunities for hybridity also reinforces uncertainties in building accounting standards. We identify two major frictions: a) Conventions for determining technical consensus and b) rules for determining levels of transaction costs. We conclude by identifying a need to think about hybrid forms critically. Although hybrid forms are an expression of creativity and collaboration, they are also performances of a certain contemporary political covenant that delegitimizes state-centered governance. The challenge ahead is to understand when and where hybrid arrangements add to socio-ecological regulation and where they undermine the possibility of more functional approaches through a performance of seriousness.
... New social and environmental dares require an overturn of this relation, with accounting systems to support the new accountability systems characterised by numerous and often conflicting, interests (Dillard and Vinnari, 2019). The shift from accounting-based accountability to MEDAR accountability-based accounting stems from several types of relationships amongst stakeholders (Biermann and Gupta, 2011) and affect both internal and external levels (Keohane, 2003). ...
Purpose
The increasing responsibility of organisations towards society and the environment has inverted the relationship between accounting and accountability, leading to accountability-based accounting systems. This study aims to explore the debate on accountability for climate change within the integrating thinking (IT) perspective. Ascertaining the most significant trends in the debate around purposes and performance that characterise climate mitigation engagement and their connections, the study would explore if and to what extent organisations are tackling climate actions.
Design/methodology/approach
A narrative review of the extensive academic literature developed from the Kyoto Protocol to date was performed. After selecting a representative sample, papers were analysed with the support of a new analytical framework that involves three dimensions – answerability, enforcement and outcome – and governance schemes that emerge from the involvement of the private and public sector and civil society. With the support of NVivo software, themes arisen were analysed and coded. Key items were labelled, creating specific nodes and synthesised into the proposed framework.
Findings
A “silo approach” largely characterises the debate on accountability for climate change. The most significant reasons behind the shortcomings of extant climate actions may be retrieved firstly in the weakness of the motivations that guide organisations to operate in a climate-friendly way.
Social implications
This study underlines the need for a 360° integrated approach for strategically tackling climate actions.
Originality/value
This study would represent a further step towards an integrated approach for studying organisations behaviours in the “climate war”, embracing the connectivity between purposes and outcomes, capitals and the relationships amongst the various stakeholders.
... A third issue relates to the increasing involvement of non-government actors, not least in Europe (Biermann, 2007;Biermann & Pattberg, 2008;Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Bauer et al., 2012). However, while making governance more complex, the involvement of nongovernmental actors may also introduce a much needed new dynamics in policy-making, as evidenced, for example, by the German Energiewende (see Box 1, and also Lauber and Jacobsson, 2015 ) . ...
Europe today is confronted by fundamental changes in its external environment as well as internally, giving rise to several daunting policy challenges. First, there is the economic challenge manifest in slow growth or even stagnation in many countries, which, although also present in other parts of the world, is particularly severe in Europe. Second, there is the challenge posed by the climate crisis, the solution of which requires nothing less than a fundamental transformation from carbon-based growth to a new, sustainable economy. Without this, future generations will be in dire straits. The third challenge concerns the governance and policy crisis now facing Europe and the difficulties this poses for policy making and implementation. It might be argued that the recent rapid growth of immigration to Europe represents a fourth challenge.
... Accountability according to Smyth (2011, p 108) is "a state of affairs in which some actors have the right to (a) hold other actors to a set of standards, (b) judge whether those actors have fulfilled their responsibilities in light of these standards, and (c) impose sanctions if they determine that these responsibilities have not been met". In simpler terms, it is a way by which authorities are made answerable for their actions (Biermann and Gupta, 2011;Dore and Lebel, 2010). Transparency on the other hand is a voluntary or obligatory action that enables accountability. ...
Over the past few decades, tackling climate change has persistently featured in international discussions, with the main issues centring on mobilising adequate global response and effectively coordinating and channelling this response at the sub-national levels. In order to effectively mobilize and harmonize resources to address climate change at country level, the idea of establishing national climate finance institutions (NCFIs) with the duty to mobilise, manage and allocate funds to implement climate change actions has gained prominence among developing countries. This study develops an indicator-based framework to evaluate the institutional effectiveness of the Indonesian Climate Change Trust Fund (ICCTF) as a case study. Building on previous frameworks and principles of climate finance, a total of 21 indicators were identified, these indicators were categorized into five effectiveness components, which are: were identified, and these indicators were categorized into five effectiveness components, which include: legal and regulatory framework, fund mobilization and sustainability, fund management and allocation, monitoring and evaluation, and transparency and accountability. We find that the major and fundamental weakness of the ICCTF is its inability to adequately mobilize funds, while its strength is in management and allocation of available resources. Inclusion of the legal and regulatory framework component, which has been largely absent in previous studies, further enabled us to identify critical legal gaps in the operationalization of the ICCTF. While the current legal foundation of the ICCTF ensures transparency and accountability, it significantly constrains the ICCTFs flexibility and innovative potentials.
... Anticipation tools serve here as a heuristic device to identify diverse futures (Sarkki et al., 2017;Talberg et al., 2018) and to democratize anticipatory knowledge production. Here, anticipation mechanisms are primarily investigated as future framings with important political implications in the present (Biermann & Gupta, 2011;Vervoort & Gupta, 2018), rather than as a proxy for merely knowing futures. In this view, participatory and inclusive anticipation practices are vehicles to interrogate and open up dominant framings of the future. ...
In times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal consequences, imagining and governing the future is now a core challenge for sustainability research and practice. Much social science and sustainability science scholarship increasingly engages with the future. There is, however, a lack of scrutiny of how the future is envisioned in these literatures, and with what implications for governance in the present. This article analyses these two aspects, building on the concept of “anticipatory governance.” We understand anticipatory governance to broadly mean governing in the present to adapt to or shape uncertain futures. We review perspectives within public policy, futures studies, social–ecological systems, environmental policy and governance, transition studies, science and technology studies, and responsible research and innovation literatures. All these literatures engage explicitly or implicitly with the notion of anticipatory governance, yet from distinct ontological and epistemological starting points. Through our review, we identify four approaches to anticipatory governance that differ with regard to (a) their conceptions of and engagement with the future; (b) their implications for actions to be taken in the present; and (c) the ultimate end to be realized through anticipatory governance. We then map onto these four approaches a diverse set of methods and tools of anticipation that each engages with. In concluding, we discuss how these four approaches provide a useful analytical lens through which to assess ongoing practices of anticipatory governance in the climate and sustainability realm.
This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
Stronger interconnections between people, ecosystems and economies in a globalized world are changing the scope and nature of global environmental governance. One area where this is becoming increasingly evident is climate change, where there is a growing recognition that climate risks can be transboundary in nature, crossing international borders as people, goods, and capital do. This suggests that a multiplicity of actors – state and non-state – have plausible claims to be engaged in or responsible for the governance of transboundary climate risks (TCRs). However, it is presently unclear on what premises a global governance institution to do so might be constructed and the roles various actors may play therein. This absence of established roles and norms creates a space for political contestation with legitimacy at its center. In this paper, we unpack the contested nature of legitimacy by examining the governance of TCRs in agricultural supply-chains. Empirically, we analyze 41 semi-structured interviews across the Brazilian-German coffee supply-chain in an effort to characterize the primary modes of governance available to manage TCRs and their perceived institutional sources of legitimacy. We identify five distinct governance pathways, each underpinned by a distinct operationalization of legitimacy. These governance pathways are not necessarily mutually exclusive; it is plausible for several to co-exist, though the relative balance between their importance in a given context may vary widely. We argue that these five pathways and the role of legitimacy in navigating their differences are transferrable to other challenges in global environmental governance. Further, we argue that legitimacy is best understood as an object of political contestation, wherein actors deploy various sources of legitimacy differently in an effort to legitimize their preferred approach to TCR management, delegitimize others, and advance their own vision of appropriate global environmental governance.
As a response to global crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, the UN has called for restoring a billion hectares of land. In recognition, both governments and the private sector have pledged to restore landscapes through planting millions of hectares of forests. Private sector investment is to play a critical role in meeting these goals, through instruments such as biodiversity offsetting, philanthropy, voluntary carbon markets, sustainability funds, and climate bonds. Such instruments allow for the value of place-based ecosystems, such as standing forests, to be circulated globally. No longer are forests horizontal (in terms of their extent on a map); they are also vertical, in terms of their entanglements with institutions, and actors, operating at various scales. An overarching emphasis on the private sector however obscures the role of state institutions in engaging these multi-scalar institutions and actors. Bringing the dimension of scale to tree planting, we examine the ways in which woodland creation, a ‘national’ policy priority for the Scottish government, brings together actors, both ‘local’ and ‘global’, in an unequal context. Our analysis uncovers that in retreating from directly creating and managing woodlands to playing a supportive regulatory role, Scottish Government’s forest policies increasingly rescale forest and landscape governance to private and non-profit sectors, and to individual landowners and communities. These actors, who are differently endowed in terms of resources, participate in forestry developments on an uneven playing field. Moreover, questions around power and distribution of benefits arise as woodland expansion increasingly becomes part of green investment portfolios, environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) commitments, offsetting, and individual philanthropy. A relational view of scale that examines prevailing relations of power and resources in given socio-political contexts can both animate and inform current discourses and policies on tree planting for climate change mitigation.
This chapter summarizes the studies’ findings, policy implications, contributions to the respective fields, and future research needs. The analysis illustrates that although the rhetoric of shared responsibilities is widely present, it has so far not led to the effective organization of joint, future-oriented action in the context of reducing food waste. Instead, a practice of individualizing responsibility is present across all levels of governance. Through the dominant understanding of responsibility as accountability, “responsible” action becomes uncoupled from many unjust background conditions in the agrifood system—external to those primarily affected—and concentrates on effectiveness as the primary output category. Since the analysis of responsibility via the triangle model as developed in this study is rather comprehensive, this chapter provides tips and insights as to how scholars may apply a simpler analytical approach to the study of responsibility relations in environmental politics.KeywordsResponsibilityAccountabilityFood wasteEffectivenessJustice
This chapter introduces current research on the concept of responsibility in terms of predominant conceptualizations and attempts to measure responsibility empirically. Looking at the dominant use of the concept in global governance research and specifically in the field of environmental governance, the chapter diagnoses a relatively narrow understanding of responsibility as accountability, and to a lesser extent, an understanding as liability that dominates the academic discourse. Methodologically, most studies are primarily concerned with measuring environmental impacts, establishing a causal link between individual actions and measured impacts, and with how such a link is perceived by other actors. Taken together, both foci not only severely narrow the potential applications of responsibility analyses, but this restricted view has, so the argument, also social and political consequences.KeywordsResponsibilityAccountabilityLiabilityGovernanceEnvironmental impact assessmentCarbon footprint
This chapter introduces the study's central concern: analyzing responsibilit(ies) for addressing the social and ecological consequences of the Anthropocene and applying this perspective to the governance of environmental issues. Questions of responsibility, who should do what, and on which grounds, are essential issues on every level of environmental policymaking, from the global to the local level. However, responsibility is currently neither sufficiently institutionalized in sustainability politics/environmental governance nor firmly established as an analytical perspective in the academic debate. The chapter summarizes what’s at stake if we neglect responsibility as a more comprehensive perspective on environmental governance and summarizes how the research design of this book addresses these shortcomings.KeywordsResponsibilityAccountabilitySustainabilityEnvironmental governanceSDGs
Voluntary standards are key instruments to address sustainability concerns in value chains. The legitimacy of these initiatives has been debated, particularly related to acceptance by Global South stakeholders. The governance literature has predominantly argued that initiatives employing democratic approaches to governance are more likely to increase their legitimacy. In this article, we use a configurational approach to test this proposition in relation to standard acceptance by southern producers. A qualitative comparative analysis of eight cases was carried out, linking three elements of input legitimacy (inclusion, participation, and accountability) to the outcome of standard uptake in the Global South. While our findings suggest that an inclusive governance structure is important, overall, they show no evidence to explain the presence or absence of standard acceptance in the Global South. We conclude that theoretical assumptions about democratic legitimacy cannot be confirmed and argue for further opening up the scholarly debate to include conceptualizations, methods, and approaches inclusive of different ways of creating and perceiving legitimacy.
Global scientific assessments increasingly reach the conclusion that transformative change of global production and consumption systems is necessary to safeguard and maintain global commons, such as biodiversity, natural forests and the ocean. Against this background the present study analyses the conclusions of global assessments and derives recommendations on how to increase the transformative potential of international negotiations and agreements as well as development cooperation programs, projects, and initiatives. The study develops a conceptual framework and argues that interventions are much more likely to achieve transformation to sustainability if they are embedded within a more comprehensive framing of transformative change. The study identifies core challenges and gaps for the conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity in general and for forests and the ocean by (i) examining the recommendations from global assessments and reports on the state of nature and the environment, and (ii) by analysing international cooperation projects with regard to their transformative potential. Finally, the study provides recommendations on how Germany can support transformation in the context of international and development cooperation.
It is widely recognized that there is a global need for a transition towards more sustainable forms of agriculture. In order for such a transition to be socially sustainable, its input (problem and goal formulation), output (policy instruments), and throughput (processes) need to be perceived as legitimate. However, we currently know relatively little on how to legitimize normatively shaped transition processes and their outcomes. We aim to address this knowledge gap by examining how the governance of agricultural transitions can be shaped to improve the perceived legitimacy of the transition. Through a combined lens of normative and sociological approaches to legitimacy we investigate the English post-Brexit agricultural transition as a crucial case-study. Building on a policy analysis and semi-structured interviews we find that in order to create perceived legitimacy of agricultural transitions, both in the English case and for agricultural transitions generally, clarity and diversity in design is essential. In addition, in order to take account of the normative and political nature of agricultural transitions, our study highlights the importance of a broad problem formulation, a diverse mix of instruments, and a process that is transparent and includes stakeholders in a meaningful and equal way. We conclude that a combined lens of normative and sociological legitimacy forms a useful framework for future research to critically evaluate the normative and power dimensions of transition processes. In addition, it can support governments in their efforts to develop policies for agricultural sustainability transitions that will be accepted by society.
The paper assesses the legitimacy of the ISO/CEN standard for sustainable and traceable cocoa during the standard-setting process and thereby to establish the degree of legitimacy achieved and to explore new sources of legitimacy in the development of sustainability standards for agricultural commodities. The paper examines the normative and empirical legitimacy concerns involved in the development of the ISO/CEN standard for sustainable and traceable cocoa (ISO 34101 series). The findings suggest that while the standard-setting organisation is establishing normative legitimacy, empirical legitimacy is lacking. Absence of empirical legitimacy is a serious concern for a successful and just implementation.
Accounting literature demonstrates that there is a lack of assessment instruments that systematically and promptly demonstrate the effectiveness of government actions, based on the principles of public governance applied to the materialization of public policies, in the federal, state or municipal sphere. This study aims to analyze the disclosure of the principles of public governance in the municipalities of the southern region of Brazil. An exploratory and descriptive research was carried out, with a quantitative approach through documentary research with secondary data published on the websites of the prefectures of the cities located in the southern region of Brazil, totaling 493 cities with more than 10,000 (ten thousand) population. The research instrument was developed with 45 items, based on the literature from the perspectives that guide the theme of public governance, considering the approach of the principles of transparency, accountability, responsability and participation. And from this data and information collection, the dimensionality test of the items was performed using exploratory factor analysis through the application of the tetrachoric matrix. In the analysis, seven items were eliminated because they had low factor loads, thus resulting in a final set of 38 items, which confirmed 4 dimensions of the principles used in municipal public governance. The results of the tests in practice pointed to the adequacy of the instrument through the convergence between the loads obtained in the exploratory factor analysis with the theoretical foundation. Thus, a list of appropriate items is presented to assess the disclosure of public governance in cities in the southern Brazil.
What is the future of 'environmental' policy in times of earth system transformations and the recognition of the 'Anthropocene' as a new epoch in planetary history? I argue that fifty years after the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, we need to revisit the 'environmental policy' paradigm because it falls short on five grounds. The paradigm (a) emphasizes a dichotomy of 'humans' and 'nature' that is no longer defensible; (b) is incompatible with more integrated research concepts that have overcome this human-environment dichotomy; (c) deemphasizes questions of planetary justice and democracy; (d) fails to deal with novel normative challenges of the Anthropocene; and (e) may risk political marginalization of central concerns of human and non-human survival. In the second part I discuss institutional implications, arguing for novel approaches in science collaboration, new institutional arrangements and a more central place for questions of planetary justice and earth-system risks in governance.
The accounting literature demonstrates that there is a lack of assessment instruments that demonstrate in a systematic and timely manner the effectiveness of government actions and that are based on the principles of public governance applied to the materialization of public policies, at the federal, state or municipal level. This study aims to analyze the disclosure of public governance principles in municipalities in the southern region of Brazil. It is an exploratory and descriptive research, with a quantitative approach through documentary verification with secondary data published on the websites of the surveyed prefectures, totaling 493 municipalities with more than 10,000 (ten thousand) inhabitants. The research instrument was developed with 45 items, based on the literature from the perspectives that guide the theme of public governance, considering the approach of the principles of transparency, accountability, accountability and participation. From this data and information collection, the item dimensionality test was performed, using exploratory factor analysis using the tetrachoric matrix application. In the analysis, nine items were eliminated for presenting low factor loads, thus resulting in a final set of 36 items, which confirmed 4 dimensions of the principles used in municipal public governance. The results of the tests in practice pointed to the adequacy of the instrument through the convergence between the factorial loads obtained in the exploratory analysis with the theoretical foundation. Thus, a list of suitable items is presented to assess the disclosure of public governance in municipalities in the southern region of Brazil.
Keywords: Public Governance; Disclosure; South region of Brazil; Exploratory Analysis
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Transnational and global environmental harm present substantial challenges to state-centered (territorial) modalities of accountability and responsibility. The globalization of environmental degradation has triggered regulatory responses at various jurisdictional scales. These governance efforts, featuring various articulations of state and/or private authority, have struggled to address so-called "accountability deficits" in global environmental politics. Yet, it has also become clear that accountability and responsibility norms forged in domestic regulatory contexts cannot simply be transposed across borders.
This article attempts to provide answers to one specific and one general question: How should we evaluate the performance of the World Commission on Dams in terms of its democratic legitimacy? And what does the evaluation of the commission's performance tell us about the legitimacy of global rule making in more general terms? Based on these questions, the article comes to two main conclusions. First (measured in terms of its inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability), the democratic legitimacy of the World Commission on Dams' standard- setting process can be challenged in several ways. Second, the difficulties in determining the commission's legitimacy in relation to other mechanisms of rule making demonstrate that we still lack a theoretical understanding of what the idea of democratic governance beyond the nation-state would entail in practice. Achieving a better understanding of this normative aspect of world politics will remain a major task for contemporary political theory. KEYWORDS: global governance, World Commission on Dams, rule making, democracy, accountability.
This article assesses the recent trend of cooperation among antagonistic private actors that results in the creation and implementation of issue-specific transnational norms and rules and the subsequent shift from public to private forms of governance. Many political scientists agree that authority also exists outside of formal political structures. Private actors increasingly begin to make their own rules and standards that acquire authority beyond the international system. This observation is often referred to as private transnational governance as opposed to public or international governance. Although the concept of private governance gains prominence in academic debates, it is not clear how private governance on the global scale is constructed and maintained or what specific or general conditions are necessary for private governance to emerge. Based on the review of common theoretical propositions, this article develops an integrated model along which the necessary conditions for the emergence of private governance can be assessed and understood. As most research has hitherto focused on institutionalized cooperation between business actors (self-regulation), this article takes a closer look at those transnational systems of rule that result out of the enhanced cooperation between profit and nonprofit actors (coregulation).
Private governance beyond the state is emerging as a prominent debate in International Relations, focusing on the activities of private non-state actors and the influences of private rules and standards. However, the conceptual framework of governance has until recently been employed predominantly with reference to the oecd world. Despite this restricted view, a growing number of processes, organisations and institutions are beginning to affect developing countries and new institutional settings open up avenues of influence for actors from the South. In the context of a lively debate about global governance and the transformation of world politics, this article asks: what influences does private governance have on developing countries, their societies and their economies? What influence do southern actors have in and through private governance arrangements? I argue that we can assess the specific impacts of private governance, as well as potential avenues of influence for actors from the South, with regard to three functional pathways: governance through regulation, governance through learning and discourse, and governance through integration. Focusing in particular on private governance in the global forest arena, I argue that, while southern actors have not benefited so much economically from private certification schemes, they have been partially empowered through cognitive and integrative processes of governance.
Nye's insights into issues of accountability, which we have discussed in the context of some of our joint writings, have been very important in helping to shape my ideas on this subject. A conference organized by Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall at the University of Wisconsin in April 2002 helped, through its emphasis on the role of power in global governance, to sharpen my appreciation of the links between accountability and power.
The issue of climate change confirms the global reach of earth system governance, whose legitimacy and effectiveness could gain from democratisation. While electoral democracy as practised in states provides no model for global democracy, lessons drawn from the performance and history of states prove helpful in identifying the elements that a well functioning ecological democracy ought to strive for. We capture these elements through reference to the idea of a deliberative system, and show how the idea of such a system can be used to analyse, evaluate, and provide prescriptions for the global governance of climate change.
The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient—they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.
We discuss the recent emergence of ‘deliberative ecological economics’, a field that highlights the potential of deliberation for improving environmental governance. We locate the emergence of this literature in the long concern in ecological economics over the policy implications of limited views of human action and its encounter with deliberative democracy scholarship and the model of communicative rationality as an alternative to utilitarianism. Considering criticisms over methods used and the focus of research in deliberative decision-making, we put forward a research agenda for deliberative ecological economics. Given the promising potential of deliberative processes for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of environmental decision-making, work in this area could help advance both theory and practice in environmental governance.
Private rule-making features prominently on the research agenda of International Relations scholars today. The field of forest politics in particular has proven to be a lively arena for experimenting with novel policies (for example, third party certification and labeling) and procedures (for example, power-sharing in stakeholder bodies). This article focuses on the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), one of the earliest and most institutionalized private certification schemes, in order to assess the role and relevance of accountability politics for global forest governance. Specifically, we ask three related questions: first, what role did a deepening accountability crisis and the resulting reconstruction of accountability play in the formation of the FSC? Second, how is accountability organized within the FSC? And finally, what accountability outcomes emerge as a result of the FSC's policies and operations? The article closes with some reflections about the limitations of private-based accountability in global environmental politics. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The present difficulties of democratic welfare states inEurope are often ascribed to economic "globalization", that is to theworld-wide integration of markets for capital, goods and services which haseliminated national control over boundary-crossing economic transactions, andwhich therefore exposes national producers to world-wide competition. In fact,however, globalization in the strict sense of the word is, at the most, realizedonly for speculative capital transactions. It is true that in all other areas ofeconomic activity the intensity of international competition has increased aswell. Nevertheless, even under the liberal regimes of GATT and WTO, governmentshave not abdicated their capacity for boundary control, and the freedom of worldtrade is still constrained by a wide variety of tariffs, quotas, "voluntary"restrictions and non-tariff barriers. All this is different within the European Union, wherenational governments have delegated control over external trade relationships tothe Union, and where they have in fact abdicated boundary control over economictransactions within the internal European market. As a consequence, thecompetitive pressure on European welfare states originates mainly from the"regulatory competition" within the Union, and the frustrations ofdemocratic governance in Europe mainly result from the fact that the range offeasible policy choices has been reduced at the national level while policymaking at the European level still lacks democratic legitimacy. I will beginwith an examination of the last point.
This article argues for the analysis of global and transnational environmental governance as administration to shed light on some important but neglected themes in international environmental law scholarship. First, it outlines several basic administrative concepts that call for analysis under such an approach (delegation, accountability, deliberation and reason giving, dynamic effects, general versus specific norms), then sets forth an analytical framework of five structures of administration in global governance, namely: distributed administration, international administration, inter-governmental network administration, hybrid administration, and private administration. Normative appraisal in administrative law is often conducted by reference to basic public law values, such as legality, proportionality, rationality, accuracy, effectiveness, efficiency, and respect for basic rights. Political theory inquiries into democracy and legitimacy in global governance may be given more applied purchase by distilling normative values and implicit trade offs, embodied in such legal-administrative components as transparency, notification, participation, reason giving, and review. Inflections in the design and operation of different administrative systems may have impacts on distributive outcomes, procedural fairness, and other elements of justice. © D. Bodansky, J. Brunnée, and E. Hey, 2007. All rights reserved.
The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer obliges industrialized countries to reimburse developing countries all agreed incremental costs incurred by them in their efforts to save the ozone layer. To this end, a Multilateral Fund was established in 1990. The Fund's decision-making procedures grant developing countries the same voting powers as industrialized countries - an almost revolutionary precedent in North-South relations. This article analyzes the work of the Multilateral Ozone Fund since its inception, with special emphasis on the development and implementation of the notion of "all agreed incremental costs" between industrialized and developing countries. Since comparable institutional settings have been stipulated in the more recent treaties on climate change and biological diversity, the article's concluding section draws five lessons from ozone politics for other international environmental agreements, in particular the emerging climate regime.
Which SUVs are most likely to rollover? What cities have the unhealthiest drinking water? Which factories are the most dangerous polluters? What cereals are the most nutritious? In recent decades, governments have sought to provide answers to such critical questions through public disclosure to force manufacturers, water authorities, and others to improve their products and practices. Corporate financial disclosure, nutritional labels, and school report cards are examples of such targeted transparency policies. At best, they create a light-handed approach to governance that improves markets, enriches public discourse, and empowers citizens. But such policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on an analysis of eighteen U.S. and international policies, Full Disclosure shows that information is often incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to consumers, investors, workers, and community residents. To be successful, transparency policies must be accurate, keep ahead of disclosers' efforts to find loopholes, and, above all, focus on the needs of ordinary citizens. © Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Some people argue that a centralized international organization is essential to improve the creation and implementation of more effective environmental policies. Will this type of system end the fragmentation among various existing agencies and treaties that deal with the environment?
This article assesses the recent trend of cooperation among antagonistic private actors that results in the creation and implementation of issue-specific transnational norms and rules and the subsequent shift from public to private forms of governance. Many political scientists agree that authority also exists outside of formal political structures. Private actors increasingly begin to make their own rules and standards that acquire authority beyond the international system. This observation is often referred to as private transnational governance as opposed to public or international governance. Although the concept of private governance gains prominence in academic debates, it is not clear how private governance on the global scale is constructed and maintained or what specific or general conditions are necessary for private governance to emerge. Based on the review of common theoretical propositions, this article develops an integrated model along which the necessary conditions for the emergence of private governance can be assessed and understood. As most research has hitherto focused on institutionalized cooperation between business actors (self-regulation), this article takes a closer look at those transnational systems of rule that result out of the enhanced cooperation between profit and nonprofit actors (coregulation).
Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency. By Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 282p. $28.00.
One of the cornerstones of Woodrow Wilson's policy agenda, even before he formally sought the presidency, was transparency. To neutralize corporate misbehavior, for instance, he called for “turn[ing] the light” on corporations: “They don't like light. Turn it on so strong they can't stand it. Exposure is one of the best ways to whip them into line.” Although the authors of this superb work do not acknowledge Wilson's part in the evolutionary line of transparency policy, they do show by means of thorough and enlightening description and analysis the fruit finally borne of ideas like those Wilson espoused. Indeed, the authors tell a story of policy design that demonstrates the continuing value of careful legislative craftsmanship and policy refinement over time, based on feedback from administration and enforcement. It is a tale of effective legislative governance, particularly at the national level, that far too many American citizens, and even political leaders, believe is impossible or at least unlikely anymore.
This article explores the prospects for transparency to be a transformative force in global biosafety governance. It analyzes whether information disclosure can further a right to know and choose, and hence facilitate oversight over transnational transfers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It examines the question of "Whose right to know what and why?" with regard to GMOs in the agricultural commodity trade in relation to the global Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. I argue that the limited disclosure obligations in this global context follow rather than shape market developments, and that complex infrastructures of sampling, testing and detection are required to put disclosed information to use. If so, rather than a normative right-to-know of importing countries, a competing norm of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) prevails. I conclude that the potential of transparency to empower remains unrealized, particularly for the poorest countries most reliant on globally-induced disclosure. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This introductory article draws on the contributions to this special issue to consider the implications of a transparency turn in global environmental and sustainability governance. Three interrelated aspects are addressed: why transparency now? How is transparency being institutionalized? And what effects does it have? In analyzing the spread of transparency in governance, the article highlights the broader (contested) normative context that shapes both its embrace by various actors and its institutionalization. I argue that the effects of transparency-whether it informs, empowers or improves environmental performance-remain uneven, with transparency falling short of meeting the ends many anticipate from it. Nonetheless, as the contributions to this issue make clear, transparency has indeed come of age as a defining feature of our current and future politics. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Public-private partnerships have been presented as an opportunity to improve the input and output legitimacy of global environmental governance, and they were endorsed by intergovernmental agreement at the Johannesburg Summit in 2002. However, their potential to contribute substantially to these aims has also been questioned. For partnerships working in the water sector, the implications of private sector participation for legitimate water governance have been disputed, for example regarding whether public-private partnerships can provide water that is affordable and accessible to all, and whether they provide opportunities for local stakeholder participation. In this article, these discussions are examined with respect to several examples of public-private partnerships registered with the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. The analysis indicates that these partnerships partially address these criticisms, but also have their own shortcomings.
This contribution focuses on carbon mitigation and biodiversity conservation in the context of the UN initiative for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in Developing countries (REDD). The design of REDD is important as it may channel much of the international funding that will potentially be made available for future environmental problem-solving in developing countries. The most important multilateral environmental funding mechanism is the Global Environment Facility (GEF). With its basic structural similarity to the emerging REDD, it provides a good starting point for drawing lessons relevant to the design of REDD. In explaining GEF priorities and performance we discuss the role of key actors as well as the organizational and institutional structure of GEF. These factors do not encourage coalitions for addressing environmental problems in the poorest countries. The institutional setting of REDD in the Convention on Climate Change may further exacerbate this trend, as neither conservation nor socioeconomic concerns like the rights and well-being of indigenous peoples and local communities are addressed. Factors that favour utilizing a similar organization structure include scope for donor trust, for bringing in established competence and a comprehensive approach. REDD must be wary of catering solely to a Northern environmental agenda.
This article compares two carbon governance instruments - the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) - to assess lessons from the former for the latter regarding effectiveness and legitimacy of such instruments. The article argues that the CDM has a relatively high degree of output-oriented legitimacy resulting in effectiveness and some input-oriented legitimacy, with few discernible tradeoffs between them. In contrasting this to REDD+, the hypotheses are advanced that (i) output-oriented legitimacy/effectiveness can again be achieved but that (ii) a higher degree of input-oriented legitimacy is necessary for REDD+ and thus also a certain trade-off between the two forms of legitimacy can be expected. This is shown through comparing the technologies and methodologies, economic rationales, political support, regulatory structures, and environmental impacts of both instruments.
This article suggests that understanding legitimization processes of private governance initiatives requires a multi-dimensional approach. This suggestion has been operationalized in three aspects that can be used to better understand such processes: legality, moral justifications, and consent/acceptance. These aspects are based on different theoretical traditions and are applied in an analysis of the process of creating legitimacy of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). This empirical research reveals the characteristics of the legitimization process of the RSPO and shows the value of a multi-dimensional approach. The three perspectives complement each other and deepen our insights in legitimization processes by revealing tensions and trade-offs in the different ways in which non-state market driven governance arrangements can create legitimacy.
When transparency is used as a tool for global environmental governance - i.e., to induce targeted actors to reduce environmentally-harmful behaviors, it can operate via disclosure or education. Disclosure-based policies improve the information the public has about targeted actors' behaviors while education-based policies improve the information targeted actors have about their own behaviors, whether that is information about consequences, alternatives, or social norms. Various social and political forces shape whether and what type of transparency policies are adopted. Disclosure-based and education-based transparency policies are effective under different conditions and operate through different mechanisms. Both often operate through mechanisms that reflect an instrumental logic of consequences but also can and do operate through mechanisms that reflect a normative logic of appropriateness, by increasing the legitimacy accorded to global environmental norms and the social accountability targeted actors feel regarding their behaviors. Understanding the differences in the mechanisms by which disclosure-based and education-based transparency policies operate suggests that both scholars and practitioners should use caution in understanding why, and predicting when, such policies will work.
To help decision-makers cope with the uncertainty of global environmental change, transnational networks of experts have offered numerous assessments of the state of knowledge, often advertised as consensus of “international science”. Substantial social science research has already analysed the effects of such global environmental assessments on industrialized countries; this study explores their influence in India as a pivotal developing country. It appears that although global environmental assessments did not remain without any influence in India, their effect is still small. These limitations could be addressed, it is argued, by increasing the usefulness and legitimacy of global environmental assessments in the South through stronger consideration of the socio-economic context of developing countries and other Southern concerns and interests, by raising the participation of Southern experts, by enhancing research capacities in and communication links to the South, and by ensuring that global environmental assessments are organized as self-adaptive processes, such as IPCC, and not as one-shot effort, such as the Global Biodiversity Assessment.
This article analyses visions of the future articulated by proponents of ‘biotechnology for the poor’, those who claim that an embrace of transgenic technology in agriculture is critical to alleviating poverty in developing countries. Specifically, we analyse how such ‘biotechnology for the poor’ proponents represent a future with or without transgenic crops. Such representations include visions of a beckoning (promising) future, where much is to be gained from an embrace of transgenic technology in agriculture, and an onrushing (threatening) future, where much will be lost if the technology is not embraced. The article shows that claims about a beckoning or onrushing future by ‘biotechnology for the poor’ proponents are based upon unexamined or problematic assumptions about the poor and poverty. As such, poverty becomes merely a moral backdrop against which visions of a future are articulated. Furthermore, ‘biotechnology for the poor’ writings do not engage in dialogue with alternative voices in articulating their perspectives on the future, losing a key opportunity to democratize debate about this crucial issue. We conclude by considering the policy consequences (in regulatory and institutional terms) of ‘biotechnology for the poor’ depictions of the future, particularly for the global South where such consequences will be felt.
In 2001, the four global change research programmes ‘urgently’ called for ‘an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management’. Yet this notion of ‘earth system management’ remains vaguely defined: It is too elusive for natural scientists, and too ambitious or too normative for social scientists. In this article, I develop an alternative concept that is better grounded in social science theory: ‘earth system governance’. I introduce, first, the concept of earth system governance as a new social phenomenon, a political programme and a crosscutting theme of research in the field of global environmental change. I then sketch the five key problem structures that complicate earth system governance, and derive from these four overarching principles for earth system governance as political practice, namely credibility, stability, adaptiveness, and inclusiveness. In the last part of the article, I identify five research and governance challenges that lie at the core of earth system governance as a crosscutting theme in global change research. These are the problems of the overall architecture of earth system governance, of agency beyond the state, of the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and of their accountability and legitimacy, and of the modes of allocation in earth system governance—in short, the five A's of earth system governance research.
This article aims to explore whether procedural rights and administrative law mechanisms – such as, for example, the right to a hearing, the duties to provide a reasoned decision and to disclose relevant information – can enhance the accountability and democratic legitimacy of earth system governance.
The democracy-enhancing potential of such mechanisms and rights – which in the national context have proved to be beneficial in strengthening citizens' participation and the acceptance of decisions – can be limited in the global arena, by a number of factors. One of these factors is “legal imperialism”, understood as the grafting onto the global level rules and institutions that impose the hegemony of western values.
In fact, administrative law mechanisms, being a construct of a certain type of western, liberal model of the state (and its capitalist model of development), could be perceived, in developing countries as an instrument to reproduce the dominant position of advanced industrialized countries and their economic actors.
The analysis suggests that in order to realize their democracy-enhancing potential, these mechanisms should draw, as far as possible, on cross-cultural principles, and be supported by financial and technical instruments enabling “developing countries” and marginalized groups to engage in dialog with the most powerful actors.
Although transparency is a key concept in the social sciences, it remains an understudied phenomenon in global environmental governance. This paper analyzes effectiveness of ‘governance by transparency’ or governance by information disclosure as a key innovation in global environmental and risk governance. Information disclosure is central to current efforts to govern biosafety or safe trade in genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Through analyzing the dynamics of GMO-related information disclosure to the global Biosafety Clearing House (BCH), I argue that the originally intended normative and procedural aims of disclosure in this case—to facilitate a GMO-importing country’s right to know and right to choose prior to trade in GMOs—are not yet being realized, partly because the burden of BCH disclosure currently rests, ironically, on importing countries. As a result, BCH disclosure may even have market-facilitating rather than originally intended market-regulating effects with regard to GMO trade, turning on its head the intended aims of governance by disclosure.
Although transparency is a key concept of our times, it remains a relatively understudied phenomenon in global environmental politics. The link between transparency and accountable, legitimate and effective governance is assumed, yet the nature and workings of this link require further scrutiny. Transparency via information disclosure is increasingly at the heart of a number of global environmental governance initiatives, termed "governance-by-disclosure" here. The article identifies two assumptions that underpin such governance-by-disclosure initiatives, and calls for comparative analysis of the workings of such assumptions in practice, as a way to illuminate the nature and implications of a transparency turn in global environmental governance and its link to accountable, legitimate and effective governance. (c) 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Right to Know: Transparency for an Open World
- A Florini
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Planet. Science and Implementation Plan of the Earth System Governance Project.
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The governance of transnational environmental harm: addressing new modes of accountability/responsibility
- M R Mason
Mason, M.R., 2008. The governance of transnational environmental harm: addressing new
modes of accountability/responsibility. Global Environmental Politics 8 (3), 8-24.