Global and European Environmental Governance

Co-ordinator: Assoc. Professor Philipp Pattberg

Core Faculty: Prof. Frank Biermann, Prof. Joyeeta Gupta, Dr Nicolien van der Grijp, Asst Prof. Agni Kalfagianni

PhD Researchers: Sliman Abu Amara, Harro van Asselt, Mairon Bastos Lima, Sander Chan,Eleni Dellas, Thijs Etty, Ayşem Mert

The research group Global Environmental Governance brings together scholars with a joint interest in governance processes that transcend national political systems, from European politics to global governance.The group is highly interdisciplinary and includes expertise in international relations, international and European law, policy studies and environmental sciences. The group aims at improving the theoretical understanding of governance beyond the state; providing an intellectual space for discussions about these phenomena; and developing novel project proposals across research themes and disciplines.

The common work of this group starts from the observation that the very structure of global and European environ­mental governance is changing. This transformation is characterised by three broad trends that challenge our standard perceptions of what we regard as effective and le­gitimate problem-solving in environmental politics and law, and beyond. These three trends define the distinct research interests that the group will pursue over the coming years.

(1) Global and European environmental governance is characterised, first, by an increasing hybridisation and de-territorialisation of governance (that is, the process of involving private actors in global environmental politics in functional spaces beyond the public domain). Global environmental governance, for a large part, is based on the activi­ties of governments and international organisations, but increasingly in­cludes insti­tu­tional arrangements that are not purely public, but of a rather hybrid na­ture. These ar­rangements might include public actors, but often attempt to environmental issues be­yond the state, deliberately ex­cluding public actors. These hybrid forms of govern­ance are in­sufficiently under­stood, in particular when it comes to their real-world impacts and broader implications for our under­standing of key social science con­cepts such democratic legitimacy,ac­countabil­ity and transparency. On this account, agency—understood as the power of individual and collec­tive actors to change the course of events or the outcome of processes—is in­creasingly lo­cated in sites beyond the state and intergovernmental organisations. Many vital institutions of global envi­ron­mental governance are today inclusive of, or even driven by, non-state actors. Private actors have joined governments to put inter­national norms into prac­tice, for example as quasi-im­plementing agencies for devel­opment assistance pro­grams ad­ministered by the World Bank or bilateral agencies. Private actors also par­tici­pate in global institu­tions to ad­dress environmental problems without being forced, persuaded or funded by states and other public agen­cies. This hybridisation and de-territoralisation of agency sets global environmental gov­ernance apart from more tra­ditional international en­vironmental law and politics.

(2) Global and European environmental governance is marked, second, by an increasing fragmentation and seg­mentation of dif­ferent layers and clusters of rule-making and rule-im­plementing, fragmented both ver­tically between suprana­tional, international, national and sub-national layers of au­thor­ity (e.g. multilevel govern­ance in the context of the European Union) and horizontally between different parallel rule-mak­ing systems maintained by dif­ferent groups of actors (multi­polar governance in the context of fragmented governance architectures). On this account, the increasing global institutionalisation of environmental politics does not occur, and is in­deed not conceivable, without continuing law and policy-making at national and sub­-national levels. Global standards need to be im­plemented and put into practice locally, and global norm-setting requires local deci­sion-making and implementation. This re­sults in the coexistence of law and policy-making at the subnational, national, regional and global levels in more and more issue areas, with the potential of both conflicts and syn­er­gies be­tween different levels of regula­tory ac­tivity. The international regu­lation of trade in geneti­cally modified organisms serves as a prime example for such multilevel gov­ernance. Likewise, the increasing global institutionalisation of envi­ronmental politics does not occur in a uniform man­ner that covers all parts of the in­ternational commu­nity to the same extent. In the case of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, for ex­ample, various recent amendments have provided for new stan­dards and timetables that are not accepted by all parties to the original agree­ment from 1987. This leads to a substantial multiplicity of sub-re­gimes within the over­all norma­tive framework. The most prominent example of such horizontal frag­menta­tion of legal regimes and policies is human­kind’s re­sponse to the global warming problem. Here, we ob­serve the emergence of parallel policy approaches that include equally impor­tant seg­ments of international society and may develop into divergent regula­tory re­gimes in global climate govern­ance.

(3) Global and European environmental governance is marked, third, by increasing commodi­fica­tion and marketisation of govern­ance (that is, the process of turning nature into commodities). The political realm of global environmental politics is increasingly supplemented by mar­kets that shift away responsibility from political actors to actors beyond the state, such as companies and individuals. This commodifica­tion of carbon, biodiversity, ecosystem services and forests (e.g. REDD) is achieved through the logic of commensuration (that is, transforming qualitative relations into quantities on a common metric). For example, in the case of carbon, it is a complex meas­urement of current practices vis-à-vis a business-as-usual sce­nario that enables emissions reductions of greenhouse gases to be assigned a market value through particular measurements and metrics. Whereas most discussions have fo­cused on the technical aspects of markets and their effi­ciency within the wider architecture of global environmental politics, less atten­tion has been paid to their politi­cal econ­omy, that is, to questions of power and hierarchy within seemingly un-political markets. However, more insights are needed into the concrete mecha­nisms of commodifica­tion and commensuration and their wider implications for equitable and fair sustainability politics.

The group maintains close links to a number of national and international networks working in the same area, including SENSE Cluster X on Global Environmental Governance; the international Global Governance Project (Glogov.Org); the European COST Action ‘The Transformation of Global Environmental Governance: Risks and Opportunities’; and to the Earth System Governance Project.