Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 28
Environmental Governance
Gavin Bridge and Tom Perreault
Introduction
The concept of 'environmental governance' has been in the ascendant since the
mid-1990s. Drawing its intellectual credentials from a wave of social science
research on non-environmental forms of 'governance,' environmental governance
has gained rapid acceptance among geographers, sociologists, environmental man-
agers, and development scholars to describe and analyse a qualitative shift in the
manner, organisations, institutional arrangements and spatial scales by which
formal and informal decisions are made regarding uses of nature. The term gover-
nance explicitly hinges the economic and the political, and its popularity within
the social sciences refl ects a broader institutional turn in which greater attention is
paid to the relationships between institutional capacities, the coordination and
coherence of economic processes, and social action. Our core claim in this chapter
is that the popular appeal of the term may be proportional to its capacity to elide
or conceal critical distinctions. Like 'sustainable development' and 'social capital'
- with which environmental governance is occasionally allied - the vagueness and
malleability of the term serve to obscure a broad range of interests and ideological
positions.
Environmental governance, then, appears to have won widespread acceptance
without the benefi t of rigorous critique to review the range of circumstances in
which it is deployed. Our modest hope is that this chapter advances such a critique.
The chapter is divided into three main sections. Following this introduction, we
distill six different meanings of governance in an effort to identify the epistemologi-
cal and methodological tensions concealed within. We then focus on two distinctive
lines of inquiry that have occupied the attention of environmental geographers:
neoliberal modes of environmental governance, and eco-governmentality. Finally,
we end the chapter by outlining an agenda for strengthening geographical research
on environmental governance.
