Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
small scales, the failures and exclusions of state management, and the problematic
nature of local management when environmental systems and social drivers occupy
translocal scales.
Recent research has thrown into question the equilibrium theories and models
of ecological systems that underpinned work on the governance of common prop-
erty resources. Highlighting the prevalence of disturbance events in ecological
systems and the capacity of these systems for 'surprise', new research emphasises
the importance of change, risk and uncertainty in the management of resources, and
promotes adaptive resource management as an alternative framework for the gov-
ernance of natural resources. Adaptive management explicitly recognises uncertainty
and seeks to optimise decision making around natural resources via an iterative
process of intervention, monitoring, evaluation and adaptation in the light of new
information (Adger, 2001). Recent research on the governance of a range of resources
- from fi sheries to global climate - emphasises the possibilities for improving resil-
ience and reducing vulnerability by designing responsive and fl exible social mecha-
nisms that allow adaptation as new information becomes available.
Governance as political participation
For some analysts, the primary problematic which governance addresses is the
expansion of the political realm from the formal arena of representative democracy
to include a range of other actors and political spaces, referred to by Beck (1992)
as 'sub-politics'. While also the case in other areas of governance, it is in the envi-
ronmental arena that extensive non-state activity has most forcefully expressed
itself. The most visible symptom of this expansion of politics is the proliferation in
number and variety of political actors on environmental issues - evidenced by the
rapid and sustained growth in environmental non-governmental organisations over
the last three decades - and the diversifi cation of arenas in which politics is prac-
ticed. The net effect is a decentring of political authority on the environment, a shift
of authority away from the state that is refl ected in research on 'civic environmen-
talism' (John, 1993) and in the rise of new social movements that articulate a dis-
tinctive 'environmental' agenda (Howitt, 2001). The increasing prominence of
non-governmental, non-elected bodies on matters of the environment raises ques-
tions about their implications - subversion, eclipse, augmentation - for formal poli-
tics (Bickerstaff and Walker, 2005). To what extent, for example, do contemporary
modes of environmental governance unbundle environmental obligations once
vested in the state, an eclipse of the public realm through the effective 'privatisation'
of environmental decision making? It is apparent that notwithstanding the growth
of non-governmental actors on environment, states retain substantial authority for
environmental regulation. Not only have a variety of 'state natures' (from national
parks to oil resources) proven remarkably durable over time, but also the 'environ-
mental state' - which emerged in industrial economies from the late 1950s onwards
to regulate and allocate the 'environmental bads' of pollution and resource degrada-
tion - cannot be written off as an historical artifact of late-Fordism (Whitehead
et al., 2007).
More concretely, practices of contemporary environmental governance prob-
lematise the core political questions of whose voices get heard and who makes
decisions. At the centre of environmental governance, then, are questions about the
rights, obligations and responsibilities of political actors - issues that go to the heart
