Improving Global Environmental Governance: Best Practices for Architecture and Agency.
Stevenson, Hayley
Improving Global Environmental Governance: Best Practices for
Architecture and Agency. Edited by Norichika Kanie, Steinar Andresen,
and Peter M. Haas. London: Routledge, 2014.
This volume brings together a cast of established and emerging
scholars from across North America, Europe, and Japan to ask "which
actors and combinations of actors are best at performing which
governance components, and under what circumstances will they be able to
perform those components?" (p. 4). The result is a book rich in
insights about how different relationships can affect the performance of
environmental regimes. Given that much environmental political science
is focused on the policies that might deliver better environmental
outcomes, the focus here on the political influence and impact of
different actor coalitions is a welcome contribution to the literature.
This is a book that will appeal to scholars well versed in global
environmental governance. The editors are at pains to stress that this
is not just another "effectiveness project" (p. 11)--what it
does not do is provide a broad survey of environmental regimes and their
performance records. Instead, it delves into the nuts and bolts of the
relationships that push environmental governance along. The editors
break environmental governance into five components: agenda setting,
negotiation, compliance, implementation, and resilience. Each component
is then scrutinized in the context of two or three regimes (including
those for air pollution, marine pollution, biodiversity, trade in
endangered species, desertification, and fisheries). The cases reveal
that strong and pusher states continue to play a fundamental role in
promoting effective environmental governance, but also that different
configurations of states, scientists, environmental nongovernmental
organizations, international organizations, and multinational
corporations can affect performance at each stage of governance. The aim
was not to produce generalizable theories of cooperation, but rather to
probe the plausibility of hypotheses about which configurations of
actors will help or hinder the effectiveness of each governance
component. The concluding chapter compiles the findings of each chapter
and points to areas for further fruitful research.
Rarely is an edited volume so coherent, consistent, and rigorous as
this one. Indeed, this project was some six years in the making and the
result is a collection of insightful cases that should provoke further
analysis of actors and agency in global environmental governance.
Reviewed by Hayley Stevenson
