Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Unpacking Environmental Governance: Six Problematics
Governance refers to the fundamental question of how organisation, decisions,
order and rule are achieved in heterogeneous and highly differentiated societies. At
its core, governance addresses the problem of economic and political co-ordination
in social life. Accounts of governance typically describe the form and geographical
scale of socio-political institutions, identify key actors and organisations, and char-
acterise how relations among these components may be changing (Wood and Valler,
2001; Jessop, 2002). The term's tap-roots trace to the 'new institutional economics'
(North, 1990), economic sociology (Polanyi, 1944, Granovetter, 1985) and regime
theory in the fi eld of international relations (Rosenau, 1991). The academic emer-
gence of governance marks an increasing skepticism towards traditional theories of
economic and political action, such as the behavioural assumptions of neoclassical
economics, Marxist analyses of the bourgeois state, or realist accounts of interna-
tional relations premised on ideas of competitive relations among independent
states.
The mainstreaming of 'governance' as an explanatory concept within the social
sciences refl ects the capacity of the term to carry several distinct meanings, accord-
ing to disciplinary and ideological context. At its core, however, are three interre-
lated concerns. First
,
the concept explicitly problematises state-centric notions of
regulation and administrative power and describes a putative shift in the institu-
tional geometries of power. Governance thus recognises political authority as being
multi-layered and often operating across several different spatial scales (Painter,
2000, p. 360, Lemos and Agrawal, 2006). Second, work on governance frequently
highlights (or claims) the obsolescence of inherited analytical categories (e.g., private,
public, state, sovereign, government) and the policy frameworks upon which these
are based. Third, work on governance foregrounds the growing infl uence of non-
traditional actors (such as NGOs, supra-national agencies, social movements, or
sub-national administrative units) and qualitative shifts in the role of more familiar
actors such as corporations and state agencies (McCarthy, 2005). Taken together,
these shifting relations are understood as a restructuring of the social compact - the
norms and expectations that differentiate and demarcate the arenas of 'private' and
'public'. Thus, in both analytical and policy approaches, the
discourse
of governance
is strongly associated with social and economic change. It is not surprising, then,
that environmental governance has assumed prominence as an explanatory concept
at a time when the authority and legitimacy of the national state
viz
. environmental
and resource issues is being increasingly called into question.
Packed into the slender frame of 'environmental governance' are a variety of
different meanings, which we unravel below. Much of the social value, as opposed
to analytical value, of the term environmental governance lies in its capacity to 'do
political work' - that is, to suggest commonalities of purpose and interest that can
obscure divergence and confl ict. Indeed, to some observers the rise of environmental
governance is symptomatic of a 'post-political condition' in which politics is reduced
to the tactical practice of producing a consensus on the need for action in the face
of an externalised threat (Swyngedouw, 2007). The popularity of environmental
governance as an organising concept, then, is partly independent of intellectual cur-
rents within social science and stems from its capacity to articulate managerial
concerns about 'environmental problems' (cf. Keil and Desfor, 2003). A defi nition
of governance as 'attempts by governing bodies or combinations thereof to alleviate
