Collective environmental governance is our best hope to avert planetary ecological disaster

World Environment Day is celebrated on 5 June to raise awareness about environmental issues and promote action to protect the planet.

We often hear and read about individual actions (eg, lifestyle changes, recycling, household solar etc), business initiatives (eg, environmental management systems, supply chain management, environmental, social, and governance — ESG etc), or efforts by governments (eg, environmental legislation, emission standards, carbon taxes, environmental assessment etc).

However, comparatively little attention is given to the opportunities and pitfalls of collective action in response to environmental problems, that is, the field of environmental governance and the topic of this article.

It is true that humans are part of the environment, but we are the only species with the responsibility to protect it. With mounting global ecological crises, there is a growing need for humans to coordinate their actions across political and geographical boundaries.

The burning question is whether humanity’s attempts at environmental governance would be sufficient to avert ecological disaster on a planetary scale.

The field of environmental management seeks to limit human impact by caring for the Earth and for human life. However, evidence of escalating ecological crises casts legitimate doubt on the adequacy of environmental management systems to control the negative effects of human activities on the environment. Global environmental problems have outgrown the ability of environmental management systems to guarantee sustainability.

With the shortcomings of environmental management, the need arose to refer to governance which, at its core, focuses on addressing “the problem of economic and political coordination in social life”. Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom also observed that the problem of collective action needs to be solved through coordination and cooperation.

Norwegian scholar Arild Vatn points out that the emergent field of environmental governance explores how institutions beyond the state, along with a multiplicity of actors, are coordinating in social life in response to environmental problems at various scales.

Thinking on how to govern expanding environmental problems has shifted remarkably since the mid-20th century. As these problems — notably the effects of global climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification — became more apparent in the 1980s and 1990s, the need for global collective action and cooperation has also increased.

The term global governance implies that not only sovereign states, but “all kinds of actors might contribute to transnational and international orders, establishing forms of governance even in the absence of an effective world government”.

Singular state-directed environmental policies, traditionally through regulations, moved to a “plethora of different schemes of self-government, public–private partnerships, collaborative efforts, policy entrepreneurs, and participatory initiatives usually gathered under the umbrella term of ‘governance’ ”.

Andrew Jordan and his co-authors point out in Public Administration (2003) that environmental governance has been associated with the rise of the “new environmental policy instruments” (NEPIs), most notably market-based instruments such as environmental taxes and tradable pollution permits, eco-labels and voluntary agreements.

Such NEPIs have become more mainstream in the last few decades, but have not completely displaced traditional government-led regulatory instruments.

Environmental governance reimagined