5. Environmental Governance Flashcards
What is the difference between governance and government?
- Governance includes the actions of the government. The government encompasses actors such as communities, businesses, and NGOs.
- Governance is a complex process that considers multi-level participation beyond the state. Includes public institutions, private sector, civil society (communities, businesses and NGOs). It evolves, and it is now different from 10 years ago.
What are MAFIs? Provide examples for six types. [EXAM QUESTION]
- Market and Agent-Focused Instruments (MAFIs) are policy instruments that use markets, price, and other economic variables to provide incentives for polluters to reduce or eliminate externalities. MAFIs are a result of the neoliberal paradigm.
- MAFIs aim to mobilize individual incentives in favor of environmentally positive outcomes through a careful calculation and modulation of costs and benefits associated with particular environmental strategies (Lemos and Agrawal, 2005)
- Ecotaxes (meat tax, flight tax)
- Subsidies (subsidies for solar or wind power, electric cars)
- Regulation and market incentives (tradable permit system, carpool lanes)
- Voluntary agreements (carbon offsetting, true pricing)
- Certification (Smartwood, FSC)
- Ecolabeling (Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance)
What is decentralization?
Decentralization means the transfer of authority and responsibility for public functions from the central government to intermediate and local governments or quasi-independent government organizations and/or the private sector.
What is environmental governance?
- According to Lemos and Agrawal (2006), environmental governance is about interventions aiming at changes in environment-related incentives, knowledge, institutions, decision making and behaviours. We specifically use environmental governance to refer to the set of regulatory processes, mechanisms, and organizations through which political actors influence environmental actions and outcomes.
What is globalization?
Globalization is the word used to describe the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information.
What is polycentricity?
Polycentricity is a complex form of governance with multiple centers of decision making, each of which operate with some degree of autonomy. (Vincent & Elinor Ostrom)
What is the historical-political process that shaped decentralization in environmental governance?
- Until the 1980s, governance was the prerogative of the state.
- With neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm, governance was no longer only the responsibility of the state
- In neoliberalism, externalities are absorbed by the market
- It emphasised the private sector and broadened participation
What is the role of international agreements?
International agreements are a countertendency. Since many environmental issues are transboundary, there is international regulation needed when things get out of hand.
Give an example of positive and negative impact of decentralization of environmental governance
Positive: community-based forest management in Mexico
Negative: the Vjosa river area
Give examples for the three hybrid forms of environmental governance
Co-management: community-based forest management in Mexico
Public-private partnerships: waste management
Private-social: national park
What is the main point made by Lemos and Agrawal (2006)?
Lemos and Agrawal argue that the effects of globalization on the environment are mostly negative and sometimes positive. They are largely in favour of decentralization and new hybrid forms of governance.
Globalization means a world that is interconnected across three areas. Which areas are these?
- Environments
- Societies
- Economies
Lemos and Agrawal (2006)
What does globalization mean from an environmental perspective? (Name 3)
- Globalization produces negative and positive pressures on governance
- Far-flung markets increase demand, intensify use and depletion of natural resources, increases waste production, and leads to race to the bottom
- Free trade regimes provide limited/inadequate environmental provisions
- Positive effects: more efficient use and transfer of tech, freer flow of information, novel institutional arrangements based on public-private partnership. Enhanced depth of participation and diversity of actors.
- Globalization couples the actions of people in one place with the threats and opportunities faced by people long distances away.
What are three justifications for the decentralization of environmental governance?
- It can produce greater efficiencies because of competition among subnational units
- It can bring decision making closer to those affected by governance
- It can help decision-makers take advantage of more precise time and place specific knowledge about natural resources (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006)
What are the cons of decentralization of environmental governance?
Decentralization may lead to forms of regulation even more suffocating than those encouraged by more centralized control. This depends crucially on the way local actors mobilize and establish alliances across socio-political and administrative scales of governance. (Lemos and Agrawal, 2006)
What is governance?
- Governance is a complex process that considers multi-level participation beyond the state.
What are concrete applications of environmental governance that Lemos and Agrawal (2006) refer to?
- Climate change
- Ecosystem degradation
Lemos and Agrawal (2006) distinguish two types of environmental governance. Which are these?
- Soft governance strategies that try to align market and individual incentives with self-regulatory processes
- Co-governance, focused on partnerships and notions of embedded autonomy across state-market-society divisions
There are different typologies of international treaties. Name and explain all three.
- Treaty: contain binding obligations, rules and regulation
- Framework convention: contains principles which are later developed further
- Protocol: spells out the specifics, e.g. emission reduction targets
What are the steps involved in making international agreements?
- Pre-negotiation
- Negotiation
- Ratification
- Implementation
- Reporting
- Renegotiation
What are the pros of decentralization?
- It can produce greater efficiencies because of competition among subnational units
- It can bring decision making closer to those affected by governance, thereby promoting higher participation and accountability
- It can help decision makers take advantage of more precise time- and place-specific knowledge about natural resources.
Lemos and Agrawal (2006)
Describe the conditions needed for MAFIs to work well.
MAFI’s work well when there is a strong relationship between governments and governance:
- Governments are the source of credible threats of regulatory action that would require costly compliance and such threats encourage the adoption of voluntary agreements on environmental standards.
- Government agencies also remain the monitoring authorities to which appeals regarding violations of environmental standards can be made.
(Lemos and Agrawal, 2006)
Why is climate change a multiscalar environmental problem?
Climate change is a multiscalar environmental problem because greenhouse gases mix equally in the atmosphere. (Agrawal and Lemos, 2006)
